Rachel Wilson (neurobiologist) facts for kids

Rachel Wilson is an American scientist who studies the brain. She is a professor of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. She also works as an investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Dr. Wilson's research helps us understand how our brains work. She looks at how tiny brain parts, called neural circuits, help us sense the world around us. This includes how we learn new things and how our bodies react to what we sense. She uses many cool tools in her work, like studying electrical signals and looking at brain connections.

Early Life and Education

Rachel Wilson was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in the United States. She went to Harvard University and earned a degree in chemistry in 1996.

Later, she earned her Ph.D. in neuroscience in 2001. This was at the University of California, San Francisco. There, she worked with a scientist named Roger Nicoll. Her research focused on how brain cells, called neurons, talk to each other. She specifically looked for a molecule that helps them send messages backward across their connections, called synapses. This is known as retrograde signaling.

After getting her Ph.D., Dr. Wilson became a postdoctoral researcher. She worked at the California Institute of Technology. This is where she started studying Drosophila, which are tiny fruit flies. She used them as a model organism to learn how neurons take in information from their surroundings. She recorded electrical signals in the flies' brains. This helped her understand how these signals were linked to different smells.

Amazing Brain Research

Dr. Wilson's lab at Harvard University studies how brains process information. They focus on how we smell things (olfactory processing) and how we feel touch or movement (mechanosensory processing). They also look at how our senses help us move and find our way around.

Her team wants to know how the brain figures out complex environments. They explore how brains learn to connect different things they sense. For example, how does the brain link a certain smell to a memory? They also study how the brain organizes our body's responses to what we experience.

Awards and Recognition

Dr. Wilson has received many important awards for her work.

• In 2007, she won a big prize in Neurobiology from Science magazine and Eppendorf AG. This was for her work on how fruit flies smell. She helped show how their brains recognize smells from signals sent by special cells.
• In 2008, she was given a MacArthur Fellowship. This award is sometimes called a "genius grant."
• In 2012, she became a full professor at Harvard Medical School. She now holds a special position called the Joseph B. Martin Professorship in Basic Research.
• In 2014, she won the first-ever national Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists. This award celebrates top young scientists and engineers in America.
• In 2017, Dr. Wilson was chosen to join the National Academy of Sciences. This is a very high honor for scientists in the United States.