Scientist: Edvard Moser

Edvard Moser is Professor of Neuroscience and Scientific Director of the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. He is interested in neural network coding in the cortex, with particular emphasis on neural-population codes for space, time and memory.
His work, conducted with May-Britt Moser as a long-term collaborator, includes the discovery of grid cells in the entorhinal cortex, which provides clues to a mechanism for the metric of spatial mapping. Subsequent to this discovery, the Mosers have identified additional space-representing cell types in the entorhinal cortex and they are beginning to unravel how the neural microcircuit is organised at the level of interactions between large numbers of diverse neurons with known functional identity – an endeavour that is significantly boosted by the recent development of Neuropixels probes and 2-photon miniscopes for simultaneous recording of thousands of neurons in freely-moving rats and mice.
The discovery of grid cells and the underlying population dynamics have led to a revision of established views of how the brain calculates self-position, and how such information is stored in memory, and spatial mapping and is becoming one of the first non-sensory cognitive functions to be characterised at a mechanistic level in neural networks.
Together with May-Britt Moser, Edvard Moser has received a number of scientific awards, including the 2014 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology.