Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce that the winners of the Brain Sciences 2022 Young Investigator Award are Dr. Dibyadeep Datta, Dr. Giacomo Valle and Dr. Morgan H James.

Dr. Dibyadeep Datta is an Associate Research Scientist of the Department of Neuroscience at Yale Medical School, New Haven, USA. His overarching research focus is to elucidate the molecular alterations and understand the etiology underlying the neurobiology of neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders that contribute to cognitive dysfunction. Dr. Datta has funded by the Yale Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center Pilot Project Award and the American Federation on Aging Research/Diamond Postdoctoral Fellowship, the Alzheimer’s Association Research Fellowship and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Summer Research Fellowship, among others.

Dr. Giacomo Valle is a Post-Doctoral Researcher of the Deparment of Health Sciences and Technology at ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland. His research interests are in neuroengineering and computational models: neuroprostheses in animal and human models for peripheral stimulation of the nervous system in order to restore sensory feedback, and to understand the somatosensory processing and the neural control of movements. Dr. Valle has recently won several awards, including the Sir Henry Royce Medal 2021 IET Achievement Award, the FENS EJN Young Investigator Prize 2022, the European Entrepreneurship Robotics Award 2021, the NCCR Grassroot Research Proposals 2021 (17kchf), and many more. Dr. Valle was also nominated as an ETH Zurich Ambassador and was among the Forbes 30 Under 30 in Science in 2021.

Dr. Morgan H James is a young investigator leading a translational neuroscience laboratory at Rutgers University. He focuses on the orexin system and addiction, examining this system from both a mechanistic and drug-development perspective. Dr. James is also interested in characterizing the involvement of the orexin system in dysregulated eating, using animal models of binge eating disorder and ‘food addiction’. Dr. James has served as a Guest Editor and Editorial Board Member of several journals. His Hirsch index is 24 and his papers have attracted >2000 citations. His lab is funded by several extramural and intramural awards, including a NIDA K99/R00 Transition to Independence Award.

The awardees will receive an honorarium of CHF 1500, an offer to publish a paper free of charge before the end of 30 September 2022 in Brain Sciences, following peerreview, and an engraved plaque.

We would like to thank all the nominators from various fields of study for their participation, and all the Award Committee Members for their evaluation of the many excellent nominations.

Prof. Dr. Stephen D. Meriney
Editor-in-Chief, Brain Sciences