Rachel Wilson (neurobiologist)

Rachel I. Wilson
Born Kansas City, Missouri
Residence Boston, MA
Nationality American
Fields Neurobiology
Institutions Harvard Medical School
Alma mater Harvard University;
University of California, San Francisco
Doctoral advisor Roger Nicoll
Notable awards MacArthur Fellow

Rachel Wilson is a professor of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School.[1] Wilson's work integrates electrophysiology, neuropharmacology, molecular genetics, functional anatomy, and behavior to explore how neural circuits are organized to react and sense a complex environment.

Biography

Wilson was born in Kansas City, Missouri. She received an A.B. from Harvard University where she developed a life-long passion for neuroscience research. After discovering that neurology was not the only way to study the brain she began to pursue a career as a research scientist. She received a Ph.D. from the University of California, San Francisco. Wilson completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Caltech under Gilles Laurent. She started her own lab at Harvard in 2004 that investigates how neural circuits process odors.

Awards

In 2007 Wilson won Science and Eppendorf AG's Grand Prize in Neurobiology for her work on the olfactory function of fruit flies Drosophila melanogaster,[2] to understand how the brain recognizes odors from patterns of impulses from olfactory receptor neurons.[3]

In 2008 she won a MacArthur Fellowship.[4]

In 2014, she won the inaugural national Blavatnik National Award for Young Scientists, awarded by the Blavatnik Family Foundation and the New York Academy of Sciences to "celebrate America’s most innovative and promising faculty-rank scientists and engineers.",[5][6]

References

  1. ↑ "2008 MacArthur Fellows:Rachel Wilson". MacArthur Foundation. 2008.
  2. ↑ "Young Neurobiologist Honored For Research Into The Fruit-Fly's 'Smell' Circuit". Medical News Today. 2007-10-26.
  3. ↑ "Mapping the fruit-fly's 'smell' circuit wins Eppendorf/Science Prize:Young neurobiologists honored for research". American Association for the Advancement of Science. 2007-10-25.
  4. ↑ Carolyn Y. Johnson (2008-09-23). "Local scientists honored, boosted by 'genius' grants: MacArthur fellowships stun winners". Boston Globe.
  5. ↑ http://blavatnikawards.org/news/items/2014-national-laureates/
  6. ↑ http://www.nyas.org/awards/blavatnikawards/main.aspx

External links