WIM no. 17 Spring 2020

מכון ויצמן למדע Last October, Prof. Rafael Malach and Prof. Michal Irani caught the interest of the cognitive and systems neuroscience communities with a brain imaging study that revealed the importance of facial geometry in how we perceive human faces. Earlier in the year, Prof. Malach uncovered a neuronal mechanism central to human free recall—rapid ripples of activity across the brain’s hippocampus. The study appeared in Scien ce . The accomplishments go on. Prof. Michal Schwartz pioneered the theory of ‘protective autoimmunity,’ which attributes a revolutionary role to the immune system in supporting cognitive function, mental stability, stem cell renewal and repair, and in combating neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s. Meanwhile, Prof. Nachum Ulanovsky and Dr. Yaniv Ziv made key findings on navigational ‘place cells’ in the brain that have important implications for understanding Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. The initial discovery of these cells garnered the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Prof. Shimon Ullman, a 2015 Israel Prize laureate, is working to narrow the gap between the visual recognition abilities of humans and the artificial intelligence systems they build. And Prof. Noam Sobel used the Weizmann Institute’s powerful 7-Tesla magnetic resonance imaging system to show that olfaction is possible even in the absence of an olfactory bulb. Accelerating multidisciplinary research The Institute for Brain and Neural Sciences will accelerate multidisciplinary research by gathering the diverse neuroscience knowledge, expertise, and infrastructure at the Weizmann Institute into a greater, collaborative, and integrated whole—creating a unique environment of physical proximity that promotes robust synergistic energy and catalyzes discovery for the benefit of humanity. Scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science has contributed to over 500 articles of relevance to neuroscience in the last five years alone, and several of those papers have already been cited hundreds of times. From base pairs to bedside, from the emerging field of artificial intelligence, to technological advances in disease modeling and illuminating the neural landscape, neuroscience stands at a precipice. With the establishment of the Institute for Brain and Neural Sciences, Weizmann is ready to soar. Weizmann MAGAZINE Cover Story