FENS President Monica Di Luca awards Yassar Roudi the 2015 Eric Kandel Young Neuroscientists Prize

The award which is named after the 2000 Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel “recognises the work of outstanding young scientists in the field of neuroscience and helps advance their careers as researchers”.

The physicist and neuroscientist Prof. Roudi has been awarded the prize “for his contributions to the applications of statistical physics to network reconstruction and the understanding of information processing in neuronal networks.”

Recently, in collaboration with Profs Edvard and May-Britt Moser, who won the Nobel prize in Physiology and Medicine this year, he has made important contributions to our understanding of the network mechanisms underlying the mammalian spatial navigation and memory system. According to Prof. Edvard Moser, “Yasser is one of very very few young researchers who is internationally recognised and active in both the neuroscience and the theoretical physics communities. 

Yasser who is now 33 studied Physics at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, obtained his PhD from SISSA, Trieste in 2005 and before becoming a professor at NTNU, has worked at Nordita, The Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics and the Gatsby Unit, UCL, one of the leading centers for computational neuroscience and machine learning in the world. His previous awards include the Bogue Research Fellowship (UCL), the Burgen Scholarship from Academea Europea, the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters young investigators award and the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters’ Nansen prize for young scientists. Prof. Roudi is also a Corresponding Fellow at Nordita and a Research Staff Member of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Italy.