Indian neuroscientist receives Early Career Award from Society of Neuroscience

Abstract

The Society of Neuroscience which recognises young neuroscientists has honoured Indian neuroscientist Abhilasha Joshi with the Early Career Award, acknowledging her exceptional research and educational contributions on an international scale. Joshi, currently a visiting researcher at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown in Lisbon, Portugal, was awarded the Peter and Patricia Gruber International Research Award by the society, according to an official press release. The award, supported by The Gruber Foundation, includes a USD 25,000 prize and travel to the Society of Neuroscience (SfN) annual meeting in Washington this week. Its announcement last month highlighted Joshi’s work on the ties between locomotion and memory in rodents, which has implications for a better understanding of the links between cognitive and motor deficits in healthy ageing and ageing-associated disorders. Two other researchers, along with Joshi, were announced as the awardees. Originally from India, Joshi conducted her graduate research at the University of Oxford in England, where she identified specialised groups of neurons that change their firing pattern in distinct ways when rodents switch between resting and running, the press release said. In her research, as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California San Francisco, she found that stepping and spatial representation in the rat hippocampus were synchronised when performing a task that required recalling previous information but not when performing routine actions. Cognitive and motor deficits often present together in diseases such as Alzheimer’s, and her research suggests these disparate symptoms might be linked. Joshi, who became one of the first Transition to Independence Fellows of the Simons Collaboration on Plasticity and the Ageing Brain in 2022, plans to investigate how neural activity related to cognition synchronises with locomotion and how it changes with normal ageing in rodents, the Simons Foundation said. She completed her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in biology at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Mohali.