Two EPFL winners of Eric Kandel Young Neuroscientists Prize
Professors MacKenzie and Alexander Mathis. Credit: Mackenzie and Alexander Mathis (EPFL)
Professors Mackenzie and Alexander Mathis at EPFL have won the 2023 Eric Kandel Young Neuroscientists Prize.
The Eric Kandel Young Neuroscientists Prize recognizes “the work of outstanding young scientists in the field of neuroscience and helps advance their careers as researchers.” Named after Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel, the Prize was established in 2009, and is awarded every two years by the non-profit Hertie Foundation and the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS). The prize includes €50,000 for personal use, a research budget of €50,000 for scientific collaboration, and an invitation to give the Eric Kandel Prize Lecture at the FENS Forum.
This year, the Kandel Prize has been awarded to Professors Mackenzie Mathis and Alexander Mathis at EPFL “for their scientific achievement in the field of computational behavioural neuroscience.”
Mackenzie and Alexander Mathis are Assistant Professors at EPFL’s School of Life Sciences (Brain Mind Institute). Together, they have developed DeepLabCut, which is an open-source tool that enables life scientists to develop tailored deep neural networks to track animals non-invasively in videos. This was the first tool that enabled this, and it was first published in 2018 in Nature Neuroscience. DeepLabCut is regarded as a breakthrough in life sciences and is used in over 1,000 leading companies, Institutes and Universities around the world with over 500,000 downloads of the software to date.
Since joining EPFL in 2020 they have further developed this tool to have leading performance in challenging domains such as being able to re-identify animals in videos and track multiple animals in complex scenes (Nature Methods 2022), and run in real-time to enable closed-loop experiments (eLife, 2020).
The collection of twelve papers they have co-authored together on the DeepLabCut toolbox has been cited over 3,300 times thus far, and critically these advances have enabled neuroscientists to study the relationship between how neural circuits give rise to complex behavior. Collectively their labs aim to not only build such broadly accessible neurotechnology, but to understand fundamental principles of how the brain gives rise to movement and behaviors.
Dr Astrid Proksch, Managing Director of Hertie Foundation says: “Mackenzie and Alexander Mathis made outstanding contributions in the field of behavioral neurosciences – for the first time in the history of the Eric Kandel Prize, two neuroscientists are honored together. With the Eric Kandel Young Neuroscientists Prize, we would like to support their outstanding work and promote their scientific career.”
Professors Mathis state: “We are deeply honored for the recognition of our joint work on developing computational tools for the study of animal behavior. We are also grateful to all past and present collaborators as well as our group members for making this possible.We thank The Hertie Foundation and FENS, and all the incredible users of our open-source tools that allow us to play a part in a lot of exciting neuroscience discoveries.”