Winner · Neuroscience Subject Award 2026
Marco Davare
The finalists
Ten universities. Ten projects. Ten academics.
Heidi Johansen-Berg
A consensus protocol for functional connectivity analysis in the rat brain
Heidi Johansen-Berg, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and Director of the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging at the University of Oxford, contributed to the multi-laboratory consensus protocol for functional connectivity analysis in the rat brain published in Nature Neuroscience, harmonising neuroimaging methods across dozens of institutions to make brain connectivity findings reproducible.
Zoe Kourtzi
Zoe Kourtzi, Professor of Experimental Psychology at the University of Cambridge, led development of a robust and interpretable AI-guided marker that predicts early dementia in real-world clinical settings, validated with collaborators across UK and Singapore memory clinics and showing how machine learning can support earlier and more equitable diagnosis.
Robert Leech
The default mode network in cognition: a topographical perspective
The default mode network was long described mainly by what it does when the mind is idle. Taking a topographical perspective, this review reconsiders its role in cognition, asking how the network's position and organisation within the brain relate to the mental functions it supports.
Robert J. Zatorre
Music and food both give pleasure, yet one is abstract and the other essential to survival. Pooling neuroimaging studies in a coordinate-based meta-analysis, the work looks for the neural responses the two experiences share and those that set them apart, a comparison that speaks to how the brain builds reward from very different sources.
Marco Davare
Magnetic pulses can activate neurons through the skull, but which neurons? This consensus paper examines what transcranial magnetic stimulation actually stimulates, explaining how the conductive properties of tissue shape the induced electric field, why the effect is strongest in superficial gyri and the white matter beneath them, and how a neuron's geometry, myelination, orientation and physiological state determine whether it fires.
Jerrold R. Turner
Paracellular permeability and tight junction regulation in gut health and disease
The gut must absorb what the body needs while keeping out what it does not, a balance held at the junctions between cells. This review examines paracellular permeability and the regulation of tight junctions, and considers how that regulation figures in both intestinal health and disease.
Jonas Frisรฉn
Clonal relations in the mouse brain revealed by single-cell and spatial transcriptomics
Single-cell studies have catalogued hundreds of brain cell types without showing how they are related. By barcoding early progenitor cells and combining single-cell with spatial transcriptomics, the team reconstructed thousands of clones, found fate-restricted progenitors in the mouse hippocampal neuroepithelium, and showed that microglia descend from a few primitive myeloid precursors that expand massively to spread widely through the brain.
Enrico Petretto
Transcriptional signature in microglia associated with Aฮฒ plaque phagocytosis
Microglia are central to Alzheimer's disease, but they are not all doing the same thing. By separating microglia that contain amyloid plaque material from those that do not, the study identified distinct transcriptional trajectories in ageing and disease, and showed that the plaque-containing signature also appears in a subset of microglia taken from human Alzheimer's brains.
LiโHuei Tsai
Human microglial state dynamics in Alzheimerโs disease progression
With 194,000 single-nucleus profiles drawn from 443 people, this work maps microglia in unusual depth across the course of Alzheimer's disease. It annotates twelve transcriptional states, identifies more than fifteen hundred genes altered in disease, infers the regulators driving transitions between states, and shows that human microglia can be nudged back towards homeostatic features.
Francis R. Willett
High-performance brain-to-text communication via handwriting
Handwriting is a deeply practised movement, which makes it a promising signal to decode. The work reports high-performance brain-to-text communication driven by handwriting, translating neural activity into written words with the aim of restoring a route to communication for people who have lost it.
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The 2026 Subject Awards have been decided.
Partners verify their data and feature their academics. Finalists were identified from open data; winners were decided by our editorial team and announced on 15 September 2026.
Explore partnership →The wider slate
The wider slate: more candidate partnerships behind the finalists.
Reactive astrocyte nomenclature, definitions, and future directions
Reactive astrocyte nomenclature, definitions, and future directions
SARS-CoV-2 is associated with changes in brain structure in UK Biobank
Reactive astrocyte nomenclature, definitions, and future directions
Reactive astrocyte nomenclature, definitions, and future directions
Reactive astrocyte nomenclature, definitions, and future directions
Transcriptional signature in microglia associated with Aฮฒ plaque phagocytosis
Reactive astrocyte nomenclature, definitions, and future directions
Transcriptional signature in microglia associated with Aฮฒ plaque phagocytosis
A review of medical image data augmentation techniques for deep learning applications