John O'Keefe (neuroscientist)

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John O'Keefe (2014)

John Michael O'Keefe (born November 18, 1939 in New York City ) is a British - American neuroscientist and Nobel Prize winner . He is known for fundamental contributions to the role of the hippocampus in spatial orientation and memory . O'Keefe is a professor in the Department of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London .

Life

O'Keefe was born the son of Irish immigrants in New York and studied at the City College of New York ( bachelor's degree). He then received his PhD in physiological psychology from McGill University under Ronald Melzack . His dissertation from 1967 was entitled Response properties of amygdalar units in the freely moving cat . As a post-doctoral student he was at University College London from 1967, at that time with Patrick Wall. He stayed there and became a professor in 1987.

He has both British and US citizenship. He is married to Eileen O'Keefe (Professor of Public Health) and has two sons with her.

Act

O'Keefe deals with the neural basis especially spatial orientation and spatial memory and the function that the hippocampus has in this. He showed how location information is stored in neural networks in the hippocampus and that there are neurons in the hippocampus that are responsible for specific location information (place cells ). He developed a theoretical model of the memory function of the hippocampus, which he tested experimentally in rodents and humans. In 1978 he and Lynn Nadel published an influential book on the subject . He also looked at the deficits in the hippocampus typical of Alzheimer's disease .

He showed that location information is encoded not only in the repetition rate of neuronal signals, but also in the phase information (using the example of the action potential of the pyramidal cells , the phase relative to the theta rhythm of the EEG is important). He also deals with robot navigation, neural networks and the use of virtual reality in computer visualizations of the brain.

In 2008 he received the Gruber Prize for Neuroscience and the European Neuroscience Journal Award , in 2007 the British Neuroscience Association Award , in 2001 the Feldberg Prize and in 2006 the Grawemeyer Prize in Psychology with Lynn Nadel . In 2013 he was awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize . He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Academy of Medical Sciences . In 2014 he was elected to the EMBO . Also in 2014 he was awarded the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience. In the same year he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine together with May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser . In 2015 O'Keefe was elected to the Academia Europaea , in 2016 to the National Academy of Sciences and in 2018 as an honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy .

Fonts

  • Editor with N. Burgess, KJ Jeffery: The hippocampal and parietal foundations of spatial cognition. Oxford University Press, 1998
  • Edited by P. Andersen, R. Morris, D. Amaral, T. Bliss: The Hippocampus Book. Oxford University Press, 2007
  • with Lynn Nadel: The Hippocampus as a cognitive map. Oxford University Press, 1978 website with online copy

Web links

Commons : John O'Keefe  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ EMBO enlarges its membership for 50th anniversary. Press release from May 8, 2014 at the Science Information Service (idw-online.de)
  2. ^ Members: John O'Keefe. Royal Irish Academy, accessed May 10, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME O'Keefe, John
ALTERNATIVE NAMES O'Keefe, John M .; O'Keefe, John Michael (fuller)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British-American neuroscientist
DATE OF BIRTH November 18, 1939
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City