Rachel Wilson (neurobiologist) facts for kids

Rachel Wilson is an American professor of neurobiology (the study of the brain and nervous system) at Harvard Medical School. She is also an investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a group that supports top scientists.

Wilson's work helps us understand how the brain works. She studies how animals sense the world around them, learn from their experiences, and choose how to act. To do this, she uses many scientific tools to look at how brain cells, called neurons, are connected and how they talk to each other.

Early Life and Education

Rachel Wilson was born in Kansas City, Missouri. She was always interested in science and went to Harvard University, where she earned a degree in chemistry in 1996.

After college, she decided to study the brain. She went to the University of California, San Francisco for her Ph.D., which she completed in 2001. There, she worked with a scientist named Roger Nicoll.

A Major Discovery

During her Ph.D. studies, Wilson investigated how brain cells communicate. Usually, messages in the brain travel in one direction across a tiny gap called a synapse. But scientists knew that sometimes, cells could send messages backward. This is called retrograde signaling.

Wilson wanted to find the molecule that carried these backward messages. She discovered that natural molecules in the brain called endocannabinoids were responsible. This was a huge step in understanding how brain cells have a two-way conversation.

Studying Fruit Flies

After earning her Ph.D., Wilson became a researcher at the California Institute of Technology. She began working with fruit flies (Drosophila). Scientists often use fruit flies as a model organism because their brains are simpler to study than human brains, but they work in similar ways.

She studied how the flies' brains reacted to different smells. By recording the electrical signals in their brains, she could see how the brain recognized and sorted various odors.

Brain Research at Harvard

Today, Wilson runs her own laboratory at Harvard University. Her team continues to study how animals sense the world. They focus on the sense of smell and touch. They also research how the brain uses information from the senses to help an animal move and find its way around.

Awards and Recognition

Rachel Wilson's important research has earned her many awards.

• In 2007, she won a major prize in neurobiology from the journal Science for her work on how fruit flies smell.
• In 2008, she received a MacArthur Fellowship, which is sometimes called a "genius grant." This award is given to very creative and talented people.
• In 2012, she became a full professor at Harvard Medical School.
• In 2014, she won the Blavatnik National Award for Young Scientists. This award honors the most promising young scientists in the United States.
• In 2017, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, one of the highest honors a scientist can receive.