Kavli Prize awarded to Pasko Rakic, pioneering Yale neur...( New Haven Conn. Today A HREF http:/...),Health

New Haven, Conn. Today Pasko Rakic, professor of neurobiology and neurology at Yale University School of Medicine, was named one of the inaugural recipients of the Kavli Prizes, for his key role in changing our understanding of the cerebral cortex, the seat of human cognitive function.

The million-dollar Kavli Prizes complement the Nobel Prizes, which since 1901 have been given for achievements in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace. The three new awards will be presented biannually to scientists who have transformed human knowledge in the fields of nanoscience, neuroscience and astrophysics. Rakic was one of seven scientists honored with the first Kavli Prizes.

The award is given in a partnership between the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, The Kavli Foundation, and the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research. The 2008 laureates were selected for groundbreaking research that has significantly advanced our understanding of the unusual properties of matter on an ultra-small scale, the basic circuitry of the human brain and the nature of quasars.

Rakic, a neurosurgeon-turned-neuroscientist, is being honored for a pioneering series of anatomical studies carried out over the past three decades that revealed how neurons in the developing cerebral cortex are generated and how they assemble themselves into highly ordered, distinctively layered, and densely interconnected circuits that direct higher order sensory and motor functions.

Pasko Rakic has contributed much to our understanding of brain function, defining the mechanisms by which co
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