MIT faculty members Nancy Kanwisher, Robert Langer and Sara Seager are among eight researchers from around the world to receive Kavli Prizes this year.
A partnership between the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters, the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research, and the Kavli Foundation, the Kavli Prizes are awarded every two years to “honor scientists for breakthroughs in astrophysics, nanoscience, and neuroscience that change our understanding of the large, small, and complex.” Laureates they will split $1 million in each field.
Understanding face recognition
Nancy Kanwisher, the Walter A Rosenblith Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and an investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, has been awarded the 2024 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience along with Doris Tsao, a professor in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. and Winrich Freiwald, the Denise A. and Eugene W. Chinery Professor at Rockefeller University.
Kanwisher, Tsao and Freiwald discovered a specialized system in the brain that recognizes faces. Their discoveries provided basic principles of neural organization and became the starting point for further research into how visual information processing is integrated with other cognitive functions.
Kanwisher was the first to demonstrate that a specific area in the human neocortex is dedicated to face recognition, now called the fusiform face area. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, she found individual differences in the location of this region and proposed an analytical technique to efficiently localize specialized functional regions in the brain. This technique is now widely used and applied to domains beyond facial recognition.
Integrating Nanomaterials for Biomedical Advances
Robert Langer, David H. Koch Institute Professor, received the 2024 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience along with Paul Alivisatos, University of Chicago President and John D. MacArthur Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Chemistry, and Chad Mirkin, Professor of Chemistry at Northwestern University.
Langer, Alivisatos, and Mirkin revolutionized the field of nanomedicine by demonstrating how nanoscale engineering can advance biomedical research and applications. Their discoveries have fundamentally contributed to the development of drugs, vaccines, bioimaging and diagnostics.
Langer was the first to develop nanoengineered materials that allowed the controlled release, or regular flow, of drug molecules. This ability has had a huge impact on the treatment of a number of diseases such as aggressive brain cancer, prostate cancer and schizophrenia. His work also showed that tiny particles containing protein antigens could be used in vaccination and was instrumental in the development of delivery of messenger RNA vaccines.
The search for life beyond Earth
Sara Seager, Class of 1941 Professor of Planetary Sciences in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences and a professor in the Departments of Physics and Aeronautics and Astronautics, received the 2024 Kavli Prize in Astrophysics along with David Charbonneau. Fred Kavli Professor of Astrophysics at Harvard University.
Seager and Charbonneau are recognized for the discoveries of exoplanets and the characterization of their atmospheres. They pioneered methods of detecting atomic species in planetary atmospheres and measuring their thermal infrared emission, paving the way for finding molecular fingerprints of atmospheres around giant and rocky planets. Their contributions have been key to the tremendous progress seen in the exploration of countless exoplanets over the past 20 years.
Kanwisher, Langer, and Seager bring the total number of MIT faculty Kavli Award recipients to eight. Previous winners include Rainer Weiss in Astrophysics (2016), Alan Guth in Astrophysics (2014), Mildred Dresselhaus in Nanoscience (2012), Ann Graybiel in Neuroscience (2012), and Jane Luu in Astrophysics (2012).