Award will support studies into how the brain learns and generates complex sequential behaviors, with a focus on the songbird as a model system.
Michale Fee, the Glen V. and Phyllis F. Dorflinger Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, has received the Fundamental Science Investigator Award. Fee is the inaugural recipient of the award, which is intended to support innovative research that has the potential to advance the frontiers of basic science.
“Fee represents the best of what we hope for as scientists,” says Michael Sipser, dean of the School of Science and the Donner Professor of Mathematics. “His basic research inspires our curiosity, leading us to new, unanticipated discoveries.”
Fee studies how the brain learns and generates complex sequential behaviors, with a focus on the songbird as a model system. Birdsong is a complex behavior that young birds learn by imitating their parents, and provides an ideal system to study the neural basis of learned behavior. Because the parts of the bird’s brain that control song learning are closely related to human circuits that are disrupted in brain disorders such as Parkinson’s and Huntington’s diseases, Fee hopes the lessons learned from birdsong will provide new clues to the causes and possible treatment of these conditions.