Eric Kandel
Dr. Kandel is a neuroscientist and psychiatrist who studied memory at Columbia University before recently retiring in 2022. His interest in studying the brain was sparked by his childhood in Vienna, where he became fascinated by how the rhetoric of the Nazi Party could transform people in terrifying ways. In hopes of better understanding why people act the way they do, he studied psychiatry, and then shifted to studying the biological basis of behavior, specifically memory. What I find inspiring about his work is that he pioneered the study of memory at a time where even less was known about the brain, and innovatively sought out new model organisms for understanding how neurons operate. His model of choice was a marine snail called Aplysia with relatively few, large neurons, making them easier to analyze. By observing what happened in neurons when they learned to associate a poke with a shock, he and his team found that synapses in the brain can be modified by learning. This work won him the Nobel Prize in 2000, and has served as a substantial contribution to understanding brain disease and memory disorders.
-Verina
