Max Planck Florida Researcher Wins Klingenstein-Simons Fellowship Award
Hidehiko Inagaki, a research group leader at the Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience, has been selected as a Klingenstein-Simons Fellowship Award Winner. This prestigious award provides innovative, early-career neuroscientists with $225,000 in funding to pursue cutting-edge questions into how the brain works. This highly competitive award was established in 1981 by Esther A. and Joseph Klingenstein Fund, who forged a partnership with the Simons Foundation in 2013 to launch the Klingenstein-Simons Fellowship Award in Neuroscience. It was only given to a select number of researchers who are pursuing high-risk, high-reward projects and show exceptional promise to become leaders in the field of neuroscience.
Dr. Inagaki started his Research Group Leader position at the Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience (MPFI) in September 2019 leading the Neural Dynamics and Cognitive Functions research group. His current research focus is to understand cellular and network mechanisms underlying cognitive functions, such as purposeful movement initiation and time perception, in mice. The Klingenstein-Simons Fellowship Award will specifically fund a project related to movement initiation.
“We study the flow of information processing in the brain, which underlies initiation of planned actions. The proposed research could help explain paradoxical kinesis, where motor disorder patients experiencing difficulty in self-initiating actions can move smoothly in response to sensory events, a phenomenon that cannot be explained by existing models of motor control. Thus, our findings may serve as the basis to improve treatments of motor disorders,” said Inagaki.
In addition to the Klingenstein-Simons Fellowship Award, Dr. Inagaki is recipient of numerous honors including the Harold M. Weintraub Graduate Student Award, the Larry Katz Memorial Lecture Award, the Peter and Patricia Gruber International Research Award in Neuroscience, and the Searle Scholar Award. To learn more about his research, click here.