MADRID 2019 The Future of AGEING

Edvard Moser is a Professor of Neuroscience and Director of the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. He is interested in how spatial location and spatial memory are computed in the brain. His work, conducted with May-Britt Moser as a long-term collaborator, includes the discovery of grid cells in the entorhinal cortex, which provides clues to a neural mechanism for the metric of spatial mapping.

Subsequent to this discovery the Mosers have identified additional space-representing cell types in the entorhinal cortex and they are beginning to unravel how the neural microcircuit is organized. In addition to showing how a variety of functional cell types contribute to representation of self-location, they have shown what mechanisms underlie the computation of space, how the outputs of the circuit are used by memory networks in the hippocampus, and how episodic memories are separated from each other in the early stages of the hippocampal memory storage.

The discovery of grid cells and their control of population dynamics in the hippocampus have led to a revision of established views of how the brain calculates self-position, and spatial mapping and is becoming one of the first non-sensory cognitive functions to be characterized at a mechanistic level in neural networks.

Edvard Moser received his initial training at the University of Oslo under the supervision of Dr. Per Andersen. He worked as a post-doc with Richard Morris and John O’Keefe in 1996, before he accepted a faculty position at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology the same year. In 2002 he became the Founding Director of the Centre for the Biology of Memory. In 2007 the Centre became a Kavli Institute. Edvard Moser is also Deputy Director of the newly established Centre for Neural Computation at the same institution. Together with May-Britt Moser, he has received a number of awards, including the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.