Prof. Haim Sompolinsky (Hebrew University website)
Denmark’s Lunbeck Foundation awarded its “Brain Prize” for 2024 to three leading scientists including the first Israeli to be so honored, Haim Sompolinsky. The world’s largest brain research prize, says the organization, comes with an award each year of award 10 million Danish Krone (approx. 1,3 million€ and $1.5 million) to one or more brain researchers who have had a ground-breaking impact on brain research.
Theoretical and computational neuroscience forms the background for modern neuroscience and is becoming increasingly important. The winners of The Brain Prize 2024 have made ground-breaking contributions to these scientific fields by uncovering some of the principles that govern the brain’s structure, function and thus cognition and behavior.
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Professor Haim Sompolinsky has been awarded The Brain Prize for 2024 for his outstanding contributions in the field of computational and theoretical neuroscience. Sompolinsky shares the award with Professors Larry Abbott (Columbia University) and Terrence Sejnowski (Salk Institute). The three have made profound contributions to our understanding of the brain. Their groundbreaking efforts have not only advanced the field of neuroscience but also have contributed to the development of brain-inspired artificial intelligence.
The organization said that the three recipients, Larry Abbott, Terrence Sejnowski and Haim Sompolinsky, have made “pioneering contributions to the field of computational and theoretical neuroscience and have made seminal contributions to our understanding of the principles that govern the brain’s structure, dynamics and the emergence of cognition and behavior.”
“The three prize winners have also developed models to understand some of the brain’s most fundamental processes such as learning, memory, perception and how the brain maps the external world,” said The chairman of The Brain Prize selection committee, Professor Richard Morris. “They have also provided crucial new insight into what can go wrong in relation to serious diseases of the brain, such as epilepsy, Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia. In addition, their scientific findings have paved the way for the development of brain-inspired artificial intelligence, one of the new and transformative technologies of our time.”
Haim Sompolinsky is the William N. Skirball Professor of Neuroscience at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem [Wikipedia Haim Sompolinsky]. His research focuses on how the brain processes information, learns, and remembers.
Haim Sompolinsky has significantly shaped theoretical neuroscience by applying methods from statistical physics and dynamical system theory to neural networks. His pioneering work began with the determination of the memory storage capacity of neural networks, which later led to the extension of “fixed points” representing memories into the notion of attractor manifolds. Such networks are now used as models for many brain systems. Further, Sompolinsky discovered the balanced regime of brain dynamics, in which large excitatory and inhibitory inputs almost cancel each other. This discovery is one of the most fundamental contributions of theoretical neuroscience to experimental neuroscience. More recently, his investigations into the geometry of neural representations in deep networks sheds light on the power of modern artificial intelligence as well as their relevance to the study of the brain.
