Körber European Science Prize presented in Hamburg to May-Britt and Edvard Moser for discoveries on grid cells and spatial navigation.
On 7 September 2014, the Körber Foundation presented the Körber European Science Prize 2014 to May-Britt and Edvard Moser in Hamburg. The prize honored their pioneering work on grid cells and the brain’s spatial navigation system, emphasizing both the fundamental and potential applied significance of their discoveries.
The Körber Prize, one of Europe’s major science awards, recognizes research with outstanding potential for future innovation. The Mosers’ identification and characterization of grid cells and related entorhinal circuits provided a detailed schema for how the brain encodes space, with implications for understanding memory disorders, dementia, and navigation-related pathologies. Their work exemplified basic research that may inform future diagnostic and computational approaches.
In the historical context, the ceremony reflected Europe’s investment in frontier neuroscience and highlighted the contributions of a Norwegian research center to global science. For women’s history, Moser’s joint receipt of the prize signaled the growing recognition of women as co-principal investigators whose leadership extends beyond symbolic representation to fundamental conceptual breakthroughs. The award helped cement the Mosers’ status as central figures in the development of cognitive and systems neuroscience.