Moser, Edvard Ingjald
Edvard Ingjald Moser, 1962–, Norwegian psychologist and neuroscientist, Ph.D. Univ. of Oslo, 1995, and May-Britt Moser, 1963–, also a Norwegian psychologist and neuroscientist, Ph.D. Univ. of Oslo, 1995. The Mosers are husband and wife and pioneering researchers in the study of how the mammalian brain represents, navigates, and remembers local space; they both joined the faculty at the Norwegian Univ. of Science and Technology in 1996. Edvard is now director of the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, and May-Britt is co-director. In 2014 they shared the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with John O'Keefe for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain. Building on O'Keefe's earlier discovery of place cells, the Mosers in 2005 discovered grid cells in the entorhinal cortex; these cells generate a coordinate system in the brain that allows precise positioning and pathfinding. The combined work of these three scientists has explained how we create maps of the space surrounding us and how we navigate through complex environments.