Young Investigator Award

Congratulations to Laurel Gabard-Durnam and Randolph Helfrich for being awarded the 2027 Young Investigator Award. We look forward to hearing their award lectures at CNS 2027 in Boston!

Mechanisms and Applications of Infant Sensory Neuroplasticity

Laurel Joy Gabard-Durnam, Ph.D.

Northeastern University (Dept of Psychology and Institute for Cognitive and Brain Health)
Monday, March 22, 2027, 1:30 - 2:00 pm, Salons A-F

Development is a period of remarkable plasticity when experiences can sculpt our brains and behavior in ways that last a lifetime. This biological embedding of experience confers both opportunity and vulnerability for learning and adaptation. However, much remains unanswered about 1) how brain mechanisms govern plasticity in human development, and 2) how experiences shape the plastic brain to scaffold emerging cognition and behavior. I will share research pointing to a species-conserved role for GABA-ergic inhibition in developmentally modulating sensory cortex plasticity and share evidence for how these developmental shifts in inhibitory function support learning from external environmental cues to shape behavior. I will then share how a learner (infant) centric framework for parsing early life experiences can reveal not just what but how infants detect learnable information during these developmental windows of dynamic sensory plasticity. Finally, my team makes sustained efforts to expand which environments our field characterizes and who contributes to cognitive neuroscience research globally. I will share our ongoing efforts to combine original methods, open-source EEG software, and low-cost EEG hardware as a toolkit to detect individual infant neuroplasticity trajectories with fidelity in largescale cohort and randomized control trial projects in Sub-Saharan African contexts. In these ways, my research program aims to both better understand and support infant experience-dependent brain and cognitive development.

 

From Time-Varying Neural Dynamics to Stable Cognitive Representations

Randolph Helfrich, M.D. , Ph.D

Yale University
Monday, March 22, 2027, 2:00 pm - 2:30 pm, Salons A-F

The functional brain architecture underlying human cognition is ever-changing, as exemplified by the constantly waxing and waning neural activity patterns in the human electroencephalogram. Despite this time-varying nature of brain activity, we perceive the world as continuous, our movements unfold seamlessly, and we are able to form stable, long-lasting memories. This raises the question: how can ever-changing neural activity give rise to our continuous and coherent experience of the world? In this talk, I will outline an integrative cognitive neuroscience approach that bridges the gap between different species, scales, and modalities, focusing on intracranial human neurophysiology. I will first show that variable, seemingly noisy brain states reflect circuit-level excitability that systematically structures human behavior on a millisecond timescale. Building on this, I will demonstrate that such variability is not noise but an organizing principle. In human prefrontal cortex, increased neural variability during working memory expands the dimensionality of population activity, creating a representational geometry that supports the stable, flexible maintenance of information and its efficient readout by downstream motor systems. In sum, this talk aims to outline how intracranial human neurophysiology offers new insight into the neural computations that enable higher cognitive and mental functions. By linking macroscale neural correlates of behavior to microscale circuit properties and the geometry of population codes, this approach offers a step toward understanding the complex interplay between brain dynamics and cognitive functions.

About the YIA Award

The purpose of the Young Investigator Award is to recognize outstanding contributions by scientists early in their career. Two awardees are named by the Awards Committee, and are honored at the CNS Annual meeting.

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Previous Winners

2027 Coming Soon!	2026 Monica Rosenberg, University of Chicago Samuel D. McDougle, Yale University
2025 Emily S. Finn, Dartmouth College Andre' Bastos, Vanderbilt University	2024 Peter Kok, University College London Ella Striem-Amit, Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington, DC
2023 Anna Schapiro, Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania Freek van Ede, Ph.D., Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam	2022 Oriel FeldmanHall, Brown University Vishnu "Deepu" Murty, Temple University
2021 Anne Collins, UC Berkeley Amitai Shenhav, Brown University	2020 Catherine Hartley, New York University Samuel J. Gershman, Harvard University
2019 Muireann Irish, The University of Sydney, Australia Michael W. Cole, Rutgers University – Newark	2018 Morgan Barense, University of Toronto Michael Yassa, University of California, Irvine
2017 Leah Somerville, Ph.D., Harvard University Nicholas Turk-Browne, Ph.D., Princeton University	2016 Adriana Galvan, UCLA Joel Voss, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine
2015 Donna Rose Addis, Ph.D., University of Auckland, NZ Christopher Summerfield, Ph.D., University of Oxford	2014 Daphna Shohamy, Ph.D. , Columbia University David Badre, Ph.D., Brown University
2013 Uta Noppeney, Ph.D., University of Birmingham, UK Tor Wager, Ph.D., University of Colorado	2012 Adam Aron, Ph.D., University of California San Diego Roshan Cools, Ph.D., Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour
2011 Michael J. Frank, Ph.D., Brown University Elizabeth Kensinger, Ph.D., Boston College	2010 Kara Federmeier, University of Illinois Adam Anderson, University of Toronto
2009 Lila Davachi, New York University Clayton Curtis, New York University	2008 Charan Ranganath, University of California Davis Kevin Ochsner, Columbia University Rebecca Saxe, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2007 Silvia A. Bunge, University of California Steven Laureys, MD, University of Liège	2006 Frank Tong, Vanderbilt University Alumit Ishai, University of Zurich
2005 Sabine Kastner, Princeton University Kevin LaBar, Duke University	2004 Anthony Wagner, Stanford University Eleanor Maguire, University College London
2003 Roberto Cabeza, Duke University Sharon Thompson-Schill, University of Pennsylvania	2002 Isabel Gauthier, Vanderbilt University Randy Buckner, Washington University Saint Louis