Perl-UNC Neuroscience Prize ceremony at UNC Chapel Hill honoring May-Britt and Edvard Moser for their discovery of grid cells.
On 3 March 2013, May-Britt Moser and Edvard I. Moser received the 13th Perl-UNC Neuroscience Prize at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The ceremony honored their groundbreaking discovery of grid cells in the medial entorhinal cortex, a key component of the brain’s spatial navigation system.
The Perl-UNC prize specifically recognizes seminal contributions to neuroscience, and the Mosers’ work met this standard by revealing a cell type that fires in a striking hexagonal lattice across environments. This pattern provides an internal coordinate system for locating oneself in space, extending earlier discoveries of hippocampal place cells and transforming understanding of how the brain generates a cognitive map.
Historically, the award highlighted the international impact of a Norwegian research group that had built a world-class systems neuroscience center outside traditional scientific hubs. For women’s history, the event underscored Moser’s role as a leading experimental neuroscientist, not merely as a collaborator but as a co-driving force behind conceptual and methodological advances. The prize helped cement the grid-cell discovery as one of the central achievements in modern brain research, contributing to a trajectory that would culminate in the Nobel Prize the following year.