UCL: Researchers win neuroscience award

UCL Professors Chris and Uta Frith have received the European Latsis Prize for their contribution to understanding the human mind and brain.

The prize is funded by the Geneva-based Latsis Foundation and awarded by the European Science Foundation to an individual or a research group who, in the opinion of their peers, has made the greatest contribution to a particular field of European research. It is valued at CHF100,000 (£60,000).

“It’s exciting to be awarded this prize and particularly to receive it together, recognising our work individually and as a team,” said Chris Frith of UCL’s Institute of Neurology. “Our collaboration shows that not only is it valuable to cross disciplines, but it is also valuable to cross national boundaries. Europe is uniquely rich in the variation you can find in expertise and approaches. In every country there is something worth borrowing or learning about in relation to knowledge and skills.”

Chris and Uta Frith have shaped the way researchers and clinicians think about the mind and brain and various socio-cognitive deficits. They are responsible for paradigm shifts across areas as wide-ranging as autism and schizophrenia research, consciousness studies, dyslexia and social neuroscience.

The prize was awarded to them as a couple and they were nominated as such. Both professors see their marital and academic partnership as the strongest formative influence on their careers.

Uta Frith of UCL’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience said, “I think we are a prime example of the benefits of the kind of interpersonal and cross-cultural cooperation that we are now studying explicitly with our Danish colleagues at Aarhus University. We have always discussed each other’s research and more recently our constant hidden collaboration has become visible to others as we now tend to publish together.”

In recent decades knowledge about both the brain and mental activities has increased exponentially. Although both fields continue to generate research independently of the other, it is in the interdisciplinary investigation of the relationship between the functions of the brain and the activities of the mind that groundbreaking research is taking place today.

The Frith’s joint, paper ‘Interacting Minds - A Biological Basis’ (1999) marked a move from studying subjects in isolation and the inception of social cognitive neuroscience concerned with the biological foundations of social cooperation.