Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine ceremony honoring May-Britt and Edvard Moser for their discovery of grid cells and work on spatial representation.
On 15 March 2011, May-Britt and Edvard Moser were awarded the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine 2011 by the Louis-Jeantet Foundation. The ceremony honored their discovery of grid cells and their role in spatial representation, as well as their broader contributions to systems neuroscience.
The Louis-Jeantet Prize is one of Europe’s major medical research awards, given to scientists whose work has the potential to transform medicine. The Mosers’ identification of grid cells in the medial entorhinal cortex showed how the brain calculates position using a regular, metric-like lattice of neural firing fields. This insight provided a new framework for understanding spatial memory and offered a potential window into neurological disorders affecting navigation, such as Alzheimer’s disease.
Historically, the prize helped consolidate the scientific prestige of the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience and the Centre for the Biology of Memory in Trondheim. For women’s history, Moser’s recognition as a co-laureate of a major European medicine prize reinforced her standing as a principal architect of this field, rather than a supporting figure. The award underscored how women can lead large-scale, conceptually ambitious programs in experimental neuroscience and contribute directly to the foundations of future clinical understanding.