Edvard Moser is a Professor of Neuroscience and Scientific Director of the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience (KISN) at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim. He is interested in neural network coding in the cortex, with particular emphasis on space, time and memory. His work, conducted... Read more
Edvard Moser is a Professor of Neuroscience and Scientific Director of the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience (KISN) at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim. He is interested in neural network coding in the cortex, with particular emphasis on space, time and memory. His work, conducted in collaboration with May-Britt Moser since they started the NTNU lab in 1996, includes the discovery of grid cells, which provides clues to a mechanism for brain map for space. Moser’s current focus is on unravelling how neural circuits for space are organized as interactions between large numbers of diverse neurons with known functional identity, a computational neuroscience endeavour that is significantly boosted by the technological development of Neuropixels probes and 2-photon miniscopes for freely-moving rodents – technologies that the Mosers have participated in developing. Based on the studies of neural mechanisms of space, The Mosers have expanded his work to include mechanisms of time perception and memory. While their main focus is on the normal and healthy brain, the work on space, time and memory has direct implications for our understanding of the etiology of Alzheimer’s disease, which at the earliest stages is characterized by neurodegeneration in the very same brain circuits that Moser is investigating in normal brains.
Edvard Moser received his initial training at the University of Oslo under the supervision of Per Andersen and worked as a post-doc with Richard Morris at the University of Edinburgh and John O’Keefe at the University College of London. In 1996 the Mosers accepted faculty positions in psychology at NTNU. They founded the Centre for the Biology of Memory in 2002, the Kavli Institute in 2007, the Centre for Neural Computation in 2013, and the Centre for Algorithms in the Cortex in 2023. All Centres have or have had funding from the Norwegian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence scheme. The Mosers have received numerous scientific awards, including the 2014 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology.