Brenda Milner Awarded Pearl Meister Greengard Prize

APS Fellow and Charter Member Brenda Milner, the Dorothy J. Killam Professor at McGill University’s Montreal Neurological Institute will be honored with the Pearl Meister Greengard Prize Thursday, November 3, 2011 for her work in the field of cognitive neuroscience. The Pearl Meister Greengard Prize was founded by Nobel laureate Paul Greengard and his wife to recognize outstanding female scientists and researchers. The honor comes with a $100,000 award.

Milner is best known for her work with a famous patient named Henry Gustav Molaison (a.k.a., HM), who had parts of his left and right medial temporal lobes removed. After the surgery, Molaison could no longer commit new events to long-term memory. Through her work with Molaison she found that people have multiple memory systems, and her research led to a greater understanding of how the brain works. Milner’s early studies also helped to establish how different hemispheres of the brain interact.

Milner has received numerous accolades for her research in addition the Greengard Prize, including the Gairdner Foundation International Award in 2005 and the Balzan prize in 2009. She is also a member of many prestigious societies, including the Royal of Canada and the National Academy of Sciences.

Milner will also be interviewed by Carol Tavris for “Inside the Psychologist’s Studio” at the APS 24^th Annual Convention in Chicago, Illinois, USA.

For more about Brenda Milner’s influential career, watch this McGill University video:

For more on Milner’s background read this Scientific American article and this McGill University profile. For more on the Nobel Laureate Paul Greengard visit his Huffington Post article The Man Who Loves Women Who Love Science.