Announcing Recipient of 2012 Anuradha Rao Memorial Award

We are delighted to announce that the 2012 Recipient of the Travel Award in memory of Anuradha is Jayeeta Basu, a post-doctoral fellow in Dr. Steve Siegelbaum’s lab at Columbia University.

Anuradha died on October 26, 2004 returning home from an SfN meeting in San Diego, when she was 44 years old. We love her and miss her still, and over the years have come to truly value the gift of having her in our lives even for that brief period of time. We give the Anuradha Rao Memorial Award every year to a promising young neuroscientist who demonstrates the potential to contribute to the field in a significant way, in the hope that others like her have the opportunity to move ahead in the field she loved. This year we received an unprecedented 130 applications from all over the world. We were moved to read the essays describing their passionate, painstaking journeys devoted to pushing the barriers of science. It was humbling and reassuring to know that brilliant young scholars are working on basic science that will ultimately be applied to better treat or prevent illness like cancer, Alzheimer’s, epilepsy, autism and schizophrenia.

We thank all the applicants for giving us the opportunity to read about their work, and wish them the very best in their future endeavors. We also thank Cell Press, especially Katja Brose and Emilie Marcus for continuing to provide their expertise, guidance and support, and Jared Graves for helping coordinate the process, so we can continue to give the award.

We thank all of you for your support through the years.