Eric R. Kandel is a University Professor and Professor of Physiology, Biochemistry at Columbia. Kandel’s research has focused on synaptic plasticity in the central nervous system and on the molecular basis of higher cognitive functions. His discoveries of cellular and molecular mechanisms contributing to simple forms of learning and memory storage provided the first biochemical insights into learned behavior.
 
For his work and achievements, Kandel has been widely recognized and received in the year 2000 the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine.
 
Until the late 1950s, investigations of learning and memory storage were dominated by behavioral approaches that tended to treat the brain as a black box. To overcome the technical obstacles that previously kept the study of learning beyond the reach of a cell and molecular biological analysis, Eric Kandel turned to a simple invertebrate animal, the marine snail Aplysia. In this animal, he was able to delineate a simple behavior, the gill-withdrawal reflex, to analyze its neural circuit in terms of its constituent nerve cells, and to discover elements in the circuit that were modifiable by learning.Using this new experimental system, Kandel analyzed three simple forms of learning: habituation, sensitization, and associative classical conditioning. In this simple system, Kandel’s incisive combination of cell and molecular biology led to the first important links between molecular events in individual neurons and behavior of the whole organism. Kandel and his colleagues have helped demystify the study of learning and memory storage in both invertebrates and mice, and place them squarely within the context of modern cell and molecular biology.
 
Eric R. Kandel was born in Vienna, Austria, and immigrated to the United States in 1939. He received a B.A. at Harvard College in 1952 and an M.D. at the New York University School of Medicine in 1956. He became a University Professor at Columbia in 1983 and a Senior Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute a year later. He is currently the Fred Kavli Professor and Director, Kavli Institute for Brain Sciences.
 
Kandel was elected to membership in the National Academy of Science in 1974, and is a corresponding member of the Academy of Science and Literature, Mainz, Germany (1988), the German Academy of Science, Leopoldina (1989) and a Foreign Associate of the French Academy of Sciences (1995). He has received fifteen honorary degrees.  Besides the Nobel Prize, Kandel has also been honored with the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Prize, the National Medal of Science by President Reagan, the Gairdner International Award for Outstanding Achievement in Medical Science from Canada, the Harvey Prize of the Technion in Israel, the Bristol-Myers Squibb Award for Distinguished Achievement in Neuroscience Research, the Wolf Prize from Israel, The Dr. A.H. Heineken Prize from the Netherlands, The Benjamin Franklin Creativity Award and the Pupin Medal for Service to the Nation.