May-Britt Moser

May-Britt Moser
Moser in 2014
May-Britt Moser
Born	May-Britt Andreassen Template:Birth year and age
Birthplace	Fosnavåg, Norway
Nationality	Norwegian
Occupation	Neuroscientist, psychologist, professor
Title	Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience
Employer	Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)
Known for	Discovery of grid cells in the entorhinal cortex
Education	PhD in Neurophysiology, University of Oslo (1995)
Spouse(s)	Edvard Moser (m. 1985; div. 2016)
Children	2
Awards	Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine (2011), Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (2014)

May-Britt Moser (born May-Britt Andreassen, 1963) is a Norwegian psychologist and neuroscientist who serves as Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway. Born and raised in the small coastal town of Fosnavåg on the western coast of Norway, Moser rose to international prominence through her groundbreaking research on the neural mechanisms underlying spatial representation in the brain. In 2014, she and her former husband, Edvard Moser, were awarded one half of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of grid cells in the entorhinal cortex — specialized neurons that form a coordinate system enabling the brain to navigate through space — with the other half going to Anglo-American neuroscientist John O'Keefe for his earlier discovery of place cells. Together with Edvard Moser, she established the Moser research environment at NTNU, and since 2012 she has headed the Centre for Neural Computation. Moser's decades-long quest to understand how the brain encodes spatial information at the cellular level has contributed fundamentally to the understanding of cognition and has opened new avenues in the study of memory, navigation, and neurodegenerative diseases.

Early Life

May-Britt Andreassen was born in 1963 in Fosnavåg, a small town situated on an island on the west coast of Norway. In her Nobel biographical lecture, she described Fosnavåg as being located in "one of the most beautiful parts of the country." The town, a fishing community surrounded by the Norwegian Sea and rugged coastal landscapes, provided a setting that Moser has acknowledged as formative to her curiosity about the natural world.

Growing up in a small and close-knit community, Moser developed an early interest in understanding behavior and the workings of the mind. The environment of rural western Norway, while geographically remote from major academic centers, nonetheless fostered in her a determination to pursue knowledge. Moser has spoken about how her upbringing in Fosnavåg instilled a sense of perseverance and independence that would later prove essential in her scientific career.

Her path toward science was not immediately obvious. In interviews, Moser has described her early ambitions as broad and not initially focused on laboratory research. However, her interest in understanding the mechanisms of behavior and brain function crystallized as she moved from her small-town origins toward higher education in Oslo.

Education

Moser received her training as a psychologist at the Department of Psychology at the University of Oslo. It was during her time at the University of Oslo that she met Edvard Moser, who would become both her life partner and her closest scientific collaborator. The two married in 1985 and began an intellectual partnership that would span decades.

At the University of Oslo, Moser came under the mentorship of Per Andersen, a prominent Norwegian neurophysiologist who served as her doctoral advisor. Under Andersen's guidance, she pursued research into the neurophysiological foundations of behavior, focusing on how neural circuits in the hippocampus and surrounding regions contribute to spatial cognition. She obtained her PhD in neurophysiology from the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Oslo in 1995.

The training she received at Oslo, particularly in electrophysiological recording techniques and in the study of the hippocampal formation, laid the groundwork for the research program that would ultimately lead to the Nobel Prize. Andersen's laboratory was known for its rigorous approach to studying the physiology of the brain, and both May-Britt and Edvard Moser benefited from this environment of precision and innovation.

Career

Early Academic Career and Move to NTNU

Following the completion of her PhD in 1995, Moser spent time conducting postdoctoral research, during which she and Edvard Moser visited the laboratory of John O'Keefe at University College London. O'Keefe had discovered place cells in the hippocampus in 1971 — neurons that fire when an animal occupies a specific location in its environment — and his work provided a critical foundation for the Mosers' subsequent research. The experience in O'Keefe's laboratory exposed them to cutting-edge techniques for recording neural activity in freely moving animals and deepened their understanding of the hippocampal role in spatial navigation.

In 1996, May-Britt Moser was appointed as associate professor in biological psychology at the Department of Psychology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim. This appointment marked the beginning of the Mosers' long association with NTNU, where they would build one of the world's leading neuroscience research environments. In 2000, she was promoted to professor of neuroscience, reflecting the growing significance and productivity of her research program.

She also held a position at the University of Edinburgh, contributing to collaborative research efforts in the United Kingdom alongside her primary work at NTNU.

Establishment of the Moser Research Environment

Together with Edvard Moser, May-Britt Moser built a research group at NTNU that grew rapidly in scope and influence. In 2002, their research group was designated as a separate "centre of excellence" by Norwegian research authorities, a status that provided significant funding and institutional support. This recognition reflected the quality and impact of their work on the neural basis of spatial cognition.

The Moser laboratory became known for its innovative approach to studying how the brain represents space. Using multi-electrode recording techniques in freely behaving rats, the research group systematically investigated the neural circuits of the hippocampal formation and the entorhinal cortex. Their work combined behavioral experiments with sophisticated neurophysiological recordings, allowing them to identify and characterize previously unknown types of neurons involved in spatial representation.

Since 2012, Moser has served as the head of the Centre for Neural Computation at NTNU, a multidisciplinary research center dedicated to understanding the computational principles underlying brain function.

Discovery of Grid Cells

The discovery for which Moser is best known — and for which she received the Nobel Prize — is the identification of grid cells in the medial entorhinal cortex. This discovery, published in 2005, represented a breakthrough in understanding how the brain creates an internal map of the surrounding environment.

Grid cells are neurons that fire in a remarkably regular pattern as an animal moves through space. Each grid cell activates at multiple locations arranged in a hexagonal grid pattern, creating a coordinate system that tiles the entire environment the animal explores. This hexagonal firing pattern was unlike anything previously observed in the brain and suggested that the entorhinal cortex provides the hippocampus with a metric spatial framework — essentially an internal "GPS" system — that allows an organism to know where it is and how to navigate to other locations.

The Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institutet, in awarding the 2014 Nobel Prize, noted that the discovery of grid cells, together with O'Keefe's earlier discovery of place cells, constituted "a paradigm shift in our understanding of how ensembles of specialized cells work together to execute higher cognitive functions." The Assembly stated that the Mosers' work demonstrated the existence of "an inner GPS in the brain" that makes spatial navigation possible.

The path to the grid cell discovery built upon years of prior research. Earlier work by the Moser laboratory had investigated the role of the hippocampus in spatial memory, including studies on how different subregions of the hippocampal formation contribute to spatial representation. A series of publications in leading journals including Science and Nature systematically advanced understanding of the neural circuits involved.

Additional Spatial Cell Types and Continued Research

Following the grid cell discovery, the Moser laboratory identified several additional types of spatially modulated neurons in the entorhinal cortex and adjacent regions that contribute to the brain's positioning system. These include head direction cells, which fire when an animal faces a particular direction, and border cells (also called boundary cells), which activate when an animal is near an environmental boundary. Together with grid cells and place cells, these cell types form an integrated circuit that enables the brain to compute and update an animal's position, orientation, and relationship to the environment.

The Mosers' research program continued to expand after the Nobel Prize. Their work has increasingly focused on how the spatial representation system interacts with memory circuits, particularly examining how the hippocampal-entorhinal system encodes not only spatial information but also temporal and episodic information. This line of research has implications for understanding how memories are formed, stored, and retrieved.

In an interview during the 2014 Nobel Week, Moser described the research as revealing that "the brain has its own map" and that understanding this internal mapping system requires identifying all of its components and determining how they interact.

In a 2024 interview, Moser discussed her ongoing research into the neural basis of spatial location and memory, as well as her motivations for continuing to pursue fundamental questions about brain function.

Key Publications

The Mosers' research output has appeared in the most prominent scientific journals. Among the publications that advanced their understanding of spatial representation in the brain are studies published in Nature and Science that characterized the properties of entorhinal and hippocampal neurons during spatial behavior:

• A 2005 study in Nature that first described the hexagonal firing patterns of grid cells in the medial entorhinal cortex.
• A 2004 study in Science that examined spatial representation in the entorhinal cortex prior to the formal identification of grid cells.
• Studies published in 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008 in Science and Nature that further characterized grid cells, head direction cells, and boundary cells, and elucidated the functional organization of the entorhinal-hippocampal circuit.

Mentorship

Among the doctoral students trained by Moser is Marianne Fyhn, who made significant contributions to the grid cell research as a graduate student in the Moser laboratory and later pursued an independent academic career in neuroscience.

Personal Life

May-Britt Moser married Edvard Moser in 1985 while both were students at the University of Oslo. Their marriage combined personal and professional partnership in an unusually close scientific collaboration spanning more than two decades. The couple have two children together.

The Mosers divorced in 2016, two years after receiving the Nobel Prize, but have continued their scientific collaboration at NTNU. Their ability to maintain a productive working relationship following the end of their marriage has been noted in profiles of the pair.

In interviews, Moser has discussed the challenges of balancing a demanding research career with family life, and has reflected on the importance of work-life balance for scientists. She has also spoken about the influence of her upbringing in a small Norwegian fishing community on her approach to life and science.

The Mosers were among a small number of married couples to jointly receive a Nobel Prize, a distinction they shared with historical figures such as Marie Curie and Pierre Curie.

Recognition

May-Britt Moser has received numerous awards and honors for her contributions to neuroscience. The most prominent is the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, which she shared with Edvard Moser and John O'Keefe. The Nobel committee recognized the trio for their "discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain," noting that their work revealed a fundamental component of brain function involved in spatial cognition.

Prior to the Nobel Prize, Moser received the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine in 2011, one of Europe's most prestigious medical research awards, in recognition of her contributions to understanding the neural basis of spatial representation.

She and Edvard Moser received the Anders Jahre Award in 2011, given by the University of Oslo for outstanding medical research by Scandinavian scientists.

The Mosers were also awarded the Karl Spencer Lashley Award by the American Philosophical Society in 2014, recognizing contributions to the integrative neuroscience of behavior.

Additional honors include the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University, one of the most distinguished prizes in biology and biochemistry, which has been awarded to many researchers who later received a Nobel Prize.

Moser is also the recipient of the Perl-UNC Neuroscience Prize.

She is a member of several learned societies, including the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters (DKNVS), the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters (DNVA), and the Norwegian Academy of Technological Sciences (NTVA).

Legacy

May-Britt Moser's discovery of grid cells, together with Edvard Moser, has been described as one of the most significant advances in neuroscience in the early twenty-first century. The identification of a neural coordinate system for spatial navigation provided a concrete, cellular-level explanation for a fundamental cognitive ability and established a new framework for understanding how the brain constructs internal representations of the external world.

The discovery has had far-reaching implications beyond basic neuroscience. The entorhinal cortex, where grid cells are located, is one of the first brain regions affected by Alzheimer's disease, and the degeneration of this area is associated with the spatial disorientation and memory loss that characterize the early stages of the disease. The Mosers' work has therefore provided a neurobiological foundation for understanding why spatial navigation deficits are among the earliest symptoms of Alzheimer's, and has opened potential pathways for early diagnosis and therapeutic intervention.

The grid cell discovery also stimulated an enormous body of research by other scientists worldwide, leading to the identification of additional spatially modulated cell types and to computational models of how the brain's spatial system operates. The finding that the brain contains a precise, geometric neural code for position — a kind of biological coordinate system — has influenced fields ranging from computational neuroscience and artificial intelligence to robotics and cognitive psychology.

As a female Nobel laureate in science, Moser has served as a prominent figure in discussions about gender representation in scientific research. She was only the eleventh woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine at the time of her award, and her achievement has contributed to broader conversations about the role of women in science and the importance of supporting diverse participation in research.

The research environment that the Mosers built at NTNU has continued to produce significant findings and train new generations of neuroscientists. Their ongoing work focuses on dynamic representations of space and memory, seeking to understand how neural populations encode not only where an organism is but also where it has been and where it intends to go.