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Home > Prizes > Prize Recipients > Michael Halassa

Michael Halassa

2017 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science

Location

New York, NY

Title

Assistant professor, New York University

Area(s) of Research

Molecular, cellular, and translational neuroscience systems; cognitive and computational neuroscience

Education

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (postdoc); University of Pennsylvania (PhD); Johns Hopkins University (internship)

Country of Birth

Jordan

Tags
biomedical science cerebral cortex computational neuroscience jordan neuroscience psychiatry thalamus
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Michael Halassa has shown how the brain attends to cues in the outside world and sustains prolonged thought, findings that earned him wide acclaim early in his career.

Halassa was born in Amman, Jordan, amid sociopolitical upheaval in the late 1970s. Hailing from a family of religious minorities in Jordan, Halassa spent childhood beset by discrimination. So he took refuge in science, and his parents, both physicians, nurtured his growing intellectual appetite. “What I had experienced in my personal life seemed so arbitrary, on a psychological level, science was like an antidote,” he says.

Halassa enrolled in medical school in Jordan and then secured an internship in the lab of an acquaintance at Johns Hopkins University. Eventually, he joined the lab of neuroscientist Solomon Snyder, with whom he developed a taste for experimental biology.

Michael Halassa stands in front of shelves filled with lab apparatus, actively conversing with his researchers (not pictured.)

He earned a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and pursued postdoctoral studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Today, as an assistant professor at New York University, Halassa’s work is focused on how the brain sifts signals from noise and builds mental representations of the world.

A group of brain cells called the thalamic reticular nucleus, or TRN, had been suspected to control the brain’s ability to pay selective attention to cues. Halassa discovered that TRN neurons that control the flow of sensory signals to the brain are active during sleep, whereas those that control the flow of memory-related signals are active in awake animals.

Applying those insights to human disease, Halassa teamed up with MIT neuroscientist Guoping Feng; they found a gene that is missing in around 1% of patients with autism plays a crucial role in suppressing noise and allowing the brain to perceive signals unimpeded. The findings suggest that therapeutic interventions aimed at restoring TRN activity might make up for related deficits in patients.

 

Awards and Accomplishments

  • Allen Institute Next Generation Leader
  • Daniel X. Freedman Prize for Exceptional Research (2015)
Tags
biomedical science cerebral cortex computational neuroscience jordan neuroscience psychiatry thalamus

Jury Members

2017 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science

Iannis Aifantis

Professor and Chair of Pathology, New York University School of Medicine

Heran Darwin

Professor of Microbiology, New York University School of Medicine

Laurie Dempsey

Senior Editor, Nature Immunology, Nature Publishing Group

Yibin Kang

Warner-Lambert Parke-Davis Professor of Molecular Biology, Princeton University

Peter Palese

Horace W. Goldsmith Professor and Chair of Microbiology, Professor of Medicine, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

Leslie Vosshall

Robin Chemers Neustein Professor, The Rockefeller University

Jedd Wolchok

Lloyd J. Old Chair for Clinical Investigation, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
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Related Prize Recipients

Sergiu P. Pasca

Sergiu P. Pasca receives the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science for developing realistic models of the human brain and unearthing fundamental insights into the biology of neuropsychiatric diseases like autism.
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Biyu J. He receives the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science for her leadership in the field of cognitive neuroscience, and for her groundbreaking discoveries on the biological bases of perceptual cognition and subjective experience.
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Jeanne T. Paz

Jeanne T. Paz receives the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science for uncovering the neural basis of epileptic seizures, and for demonstrating possible methods of predicting and arresting seizures.
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