San Diego institutions boast of world’s top neuroscientists

San Diego will be the brainiest city in the country for the next few days.

The Society for Neuroscience is holding its annual convention here, hosting almost 30,000 people. Most of them are researchers who broadly and narrowly work on two of the hardest questions in science: Exactly how does the brain work? And how do you prevent and treat injuries that affect the brain and spinal cord?

The society — the largest of its kind in the world — is meeting in San Diego at a key moment. The Obama administration is preparing to greatly expand the amount of money it devotes to brain research.

Millions of those dollars will flow to San Diego, which has one of the largest collections of neuroscientists in the world. Here are 10 local researchers whose work has proven to be especially influential.

FRED GAGE Salk Institute

Gage shook science in 1998 when he discovered that adults do produce new brain cells, overturning the belief that humans are born with all the neurons they’ll ever have. These newly created neurons are stem cells that arise in the hippocampus, which plays a key role in long-term memory and navigation. Gage is studying why the new cells appear in the hippocampus. There’s early indication that those cells develop better in people who are physically and mentally active.

ED CALLAWAY Salk Institute

Cells connect to one another, creating circuits that allow the brain to function. The circuits are notoriously hard to study, but Callaway has simplified things a bit with the use of a rabies virus. Scientists modify the virus to make it infect a single brain cell. The virus spreads to other cells, highlighting the shape and location of the circuit. This enables scientists to home in on specific circuits to study how they behave and figure out what role they play.

KAREN EMMOREY San Diego State University

Emmorey studies the neurobiology of signed languages, or languages produced by the hands rather than by the tongue and understood by the eye rather than the ear. She’s been finding similarities and differences between areas of the brain that are used to comprehend and produce signed and spoken language. Her goal is to understand how human language is represented in the brain, how signs differ from gestures and what areas of the brain are critical for deaf signers, which could lead to therapies for signers with linguistic impairments.


Izhikevich has been developing computational tools that allow for large-scale simulations of the brain, based on realistic anatomy and behavior. One of his models simulated a brain with 100 billion neurons and a quadrillion synapses — roughly what is to be found in a human brain. His work at the Brain Corporation is meant to create an artificial nervous systems for robots, so that robots would behave less like robots and more like animals.

GEORGE KOOB The Scripps Research Institute

Koob is looking for ways to shield the brain from the damage caused by legal drugs, such as alcohol and nicotine, and illicit drugs such as cocaine and heroin. Koob has been focusing on experiments meant to help a person ease off drugs of abuse by restoring the reward and stress-aversion system in the brain. Part of his work involves a vaccine that keeps heroin in the bloodstream, preventing it from reaching the brain.


Ramachandran has been nicknamed the “Marco Polo of neuroscience” for his wide-ranging explorations of how the brain works, in areas ranging from autism to how people perceive color. He’s also well-known for coming up with a treatment for people who feel pain in areas of their body where a limb has been amputated. The therapy involves using a mirror to reflect an intact limb, which tricks the brain into thinking that the missing limb is still there. For many people, this treatment helps their “phantom limb pain” subside or go away.


Scientists need to be able to see what vast numbers of brain cells are doing at any given moment. Greenspan co-authored a plan to make that possible with the creation of new imaging tools. The idea led to the Obama administration’s Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) initiative, a $110 million effort that could become as big as the Human Genome Project. BRAIN will help Greenspan with his own work, which involves studying how genes affect the behavior of fruit flies, animals that develop many of the neurological diseases found in humans.


Sejnowski is a member of the dream team of scientists assisting the National Institutes of Health in deciding what the BRAIN initiative will focus on. Sejnowski studies how neurons communicate and uses this information to create computer simulations that mimic the brain’s neural networks. These simulations can perform operations that resemble neural activity, helping to explain how the human brain is capable of learning and storing memories.


Spitzer is known for his pioneering studies of the way the brain’s electrical activity changes brain function, both during development of a human embryo and during a person’s adulthood. His work has helped reveal how the brain’s wiring is assembled and how neurons acquire the appropriate neurotransmitters — the molecules that neurons use to signal other neurons. Spitzer also has shown that stimuli such as light can change the chemistry of the brain, and thus affecting behavior. Such research is crucial to finding ways to treat a variety of neurological and psychiatric disorders, including Parkinson’s disease and depression.


Squire is among the world’s most respected authorities on how human memory works, and why it fails. He is especially well-known for discovering that humans have two types of long-term memory, and that when one of them fails, the other can help take up the slack and enable people to learn new tasks. Squire is also famous for creating maps that highlight which areas of the brain engage when people remember things. He is a past president of the Society of Neuroscience.

Sources: University of California San Diego, San Diego State University, Brain Corp., Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute, Salk Institute, The Scripps Research Institute, National Academy of Sciences, Wikipedia.