Edvard Moser

Edvard Moser
Born	Edvard Ingjald Moser 27 4, 1962
Birthplace	Ålesund, Norway
Nationality	Norwegian
Occupation	Neuroscientist, psychologist
Title	Professor of Neuroscience
Employer	Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)
Known for	Discovery of grid cells, research on brain's spatial representation system
Education	University of Oslo (Ph.D.)
Spouse(s)	May-Britt Moser (m. 1985; div. 2016)
Awards	Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine (2011) Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (2014) Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences (2014)

Edvard Ingjald Moser (born 27 April 1962) is a Norwegian psychologist and neuroscientist who serves as a professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway. He is known for his groundbreaking research on the brain's spatial representation system, particularly the discovery of grid cells — a specialized type of neuron in the entorhinal cortex that forms a coordinate system enabling the brain to navigate through space. For this work, Moser shared the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with his long-term collaborator and former wife May-Britt Moser and their previous mentor John O'Keefe. Together, the three laureates were recognized for having "discovered the cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain," often described in popular accounts as the brain's internal GPS. Over the course of a career spent largely near the Arctic Circle, Moser and his colleagues have fundamentally reshaped the understanding of how the brain encodes spatial information, memory, and navigation.

Early Life

Edvard Ingjald Moser was born on 27 April 1962 in Ålesund, a coastal town on the western coast of Norway. He grew up in the rural surroundings of the Ålesund region, an environment that fostered an early interest in the natural world. Moser developed a curiosity about biological processes and the workings of the mind from a young age, interests that would eventually guide him toward the study of psychology and neuroscience.

Details of Moser's childhood and family background remain relatively private. What is documented is that his upbringing in western Norway provided a foundation for the rigorous scientific temperament he would carry into his academic career. The cultural and geographical context of his early life — growing up in a small Norwegian city far from major international research centres — makes his subsequent trajectory toward the highest echelons of global science all the more notable.

Education

Moser pursued his higher education at the University of Oslo, where he studied psychology and developed an interest in the biological underpinnings of behaviour and cognition. It was at the University of Oslo that Moser met May-Britt Moser, who would become both his life partner and his closest scientific collaborator; the two married in 1985.

During their time at the University of Oslo, the Mosers became interested in the neural basis of spatial learning and memory. They were drawn to the work of John O'Keefe, who in the early 1970s had discovered place cells in the hippocampus — neurons that fire when an animal occupies a specific location in its environment. Edvard Moser completed his doctoral work at the University of Oslo, receiving his Ph.D. in neurophysiology. His doctoral research focused on the hippocampal formation and its role in spatial memory, laying the groundwork for the discoveries that would come in subsequent decades.

Following the completion of his doctorate, Moser undertook postdoctoral research with John O'Keefe at University College London, an experience that proved formative for his scientific career. Working in O'Keefe's laboratory, Moser gained expertise in the electrophysiological recording techniques used to study the activity of individual neurons in freely behaving animals, methods that would become central to his own research programme.

Career

Early Academic Career at NTNU

In 1996, Edvard 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. He was promoted to full professor of neuroscience in 1998, a rapid advance that reflected the significance and productivity of his research programme. Both Edvard and May-Britt Moser established their laboratories at NTNU, where they built a research environment that would become one of the most productive neuroscience centres in the world.

The decision to build a major neuroscience research operation in Trondheim — a mid-sized Norwegian city situated well above the 63rd parallel — was unconventional. At a time when most leading neuroscience research was concentrated in major metropolitan centres in the United States and Western Europe, the Mosers chose to develop their programme in Norway, motivated in part by the desire to contribute to Norwegian science and by the institutional support NTNU offered for building a new research centre.

In 2002, the Moser research group was elevated to the status of a separate "centre of excellence" by the Research Council of Norway, a recognition that provided substantial long-term funding and allowed the group to expand significantly. Edvard Moser has led a succession of research groups and centres, collectively known as the Moser research environment, which has encompassed the Centre for the Biology of Memory and later the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience.

Discovery of Grid Cells

The discovery for which Edvard Moser is most celebrated came in 2005, when his research group, working in close collaboration with May-Britt Moser, identified a previously unknown type of neuron in the medial entorhinal cortex of rats. These neurons, which they named grid cells, fired in a remarkably regular pattern as an animal moved through its environment. When the firing locations of a single grid cell were plotted on a map of the environment, they formed a strikingly regular hexagonal lattice — a geometric pattern resembling a grid of equilateral triangles.

This finding was published in Nature in 2005 and immediately recognized as a major breakthrough in understanding how the brain represents space. While O'Keefe's place cells in the hippocampus signalled specific locations, grid cells in the entorhinal cortex appeared to provide a more fundamental metric coordinate system — a neural mechanism for measuring distances and directions, akin to the coordinate lines on a map. The Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute later described this discovery as revealing "a positioning system, an 'inner GPS' in the brain, that makes it possible to orient ourselves in space."

The discovery of grid cells opened an entirely new area of investigation in systems neuroscience. In subsequent years, the Moser laboratory identified additional cell types in the entorhinal cortex that contributed to the brain's spatial navigation system. These included border cells (also known as boundary cells), which fire when an animal is near the edges or boundaries of its environment, and head direction cells, which fire preferentially when the animal faces a particular direction. Together, these different cell types appeared to form an integrated navigation circuit, with grid cells providing a metric framework, head direction cells encoding orientation, and border cells anchoring the representation to environmental landmarks.

Mechanisms and Computational Models

The regularity and mathematical elegance of grid cell firing patterns attracted considerable interest from computational neuroscientists and theorists. The hexagonal lattice formed by grid cells is the most efficient way to tile a plane with repeating points — a fact from mathematics that suggested the brain had evolved an optimal solution for spatial representation. Moser and colleagues explored how grid cells with different spatial scales (some with small grids, others with larger grids) were organized along the dorsoventral axis of the entorhinal cortex, with cells in dorsal regions having smaller grid spacing and those in more ventral regions having larger spacing.

The Mosers' research also investigated how the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex interact. Earlier work had established the importance of the hippocampus for spatial memory and episodic memory, but the specific contributions of the entorhinal cortex had remained poorly understood. When the Mosers entered the neuroscience field in the mid-1990s, the entorhinal cortex was described as "an uncharted brain region." Their systematic exploration of this region transformed it into one of the most actively studied areas in all of neuroscience.

Research from the Moser laboratory published in Science contributed further to understanding the neural architecture of spatial representation. Studies examined the relationship between hippocampal place cells and entorhinal grid cells, exploring how the two systems collaborate to generate cognitive maps of the environment.

The Moser Research Environment

Together with May-Britt Moser, Edvard Moser established and led what became known as the Moser research environment at NTNU. This encompassed several formally designated centres and institutes. The Centre for the Biology of Memory was established in the early 2000s as one of Norway's Centres of Excellence. It was later succeeded by the Centre for Neural Computation and then the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, which was established with support from the Kavli Foundation.

Under the Mosers' leadership, these centres attracted researchers from around the world and became one of the premier destinations for training in systems neuroscience. Doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows trained in the Moser laboratory went on to establish independent research programmes at institutions across Europe, North America, and Asia. Among the doctoral students supervised by Edvard Moser was Marianne Fyhn, who contributed to several key publications on grid cells.

The national research infrastructure NORBRAIN, which supports brain research across Norwegian institutions, has also been connected to the Moser research environment. In 2025, NORBRAIN4 was granted over 80 million Norwegian kroner by the Research Council of Norway, continuing support for research on spatial awareness, memory, and other brain functions.

Previous Hippocampal Research

Before the landmark discovery of grid cells, Edvard Moser had already made significant contributions to the understanding of hippocampal function. His earlier published work, appearing in journals such as Science, examined the spatial and temporal properties of hippocampal neural activity and the role of the hippocampus in learning and memory. A 1993 study in Science examined aspects of hippocampal physiology relevant to spatial memory. A 2002 publication further explored hippocampal representations. These studies laid the empirical and conceptual foundation for the later investigations of the entorhinal cortex that led to the grid cell discovery.

A key step in the trajectory toward the grid cell discovery was the realization that the entorhinal cortex — a major input region to the hippocampus — must contain spatial information of its own, since place cell activity in the hippocampus depended in part on inputs from this region. This logic drove the Mosers to begin recording from entorhinal neurons, leading directly to the 2005 breakthrough.

Personal Life

Edvard Moser married May-Britt Moser in 1985. The couple met as students at the University of Oslo and became both romantic and scientific partners, collaborating closely throughout their careers. Their partnership was frequently noted in media coverage as an unusual example of a married couple working together at the highest levels of scientific research — a dynamic sometimes compared to that of Marie and Pierre Curie.

The Mosers divorced in 2016, two years after receiving the Nobel Prize, but continued their professional collaboration at NTNU. They have children together, though specific details about their family life remain private.

In interviews given during the Nobel Week in Stockholm in December 2014, both Edvard and May-Britt Moser spoke about their shared scientific journey and the excitement of their discoveries about the brain's spatial navigation system.

Moser has lived and worked in Trondheim since the mid-1990s, making the city an unlikely global hub for neuroscience research.

Recognition

Edvard Moser has received numerous awards and honors throughout his career, reflecting the significance of his contributions to neuroscience.

The most prominent of these is the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, which he shared in 2014 with May-Britt Moser and John O'Keefe. The Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute awarded the prize with one half to O'Keefe and the other half jointly to May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser "for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain."

Prior to the Nobel Prize, Moser received the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine in 2011, a prestigious European award recognizing biomedical research. He also received the Karl Spencer Lashley Award from the American Philosophical Society in 2014.

Moser was named a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States in 2014, one of the highest honors available to non-American scientists. He is also a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Additional recognition includes the Perl-UNC Neuroscience Prize and the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University.

Moser 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). He also served on the council of the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS).

Legacy

Edvard Moser's scientific contributions have fundamentally altered the understanding of how the brain represents and navigates through space. The discovery of grid cells in 2005, along with the subsequent identification of border cells and other spatially modulated neurons in the entorhinal cortex, established a new framework for understanding the neural basis of navigation and spatial cognition. These discoveries complemented and extended the earlier work of John O'Keefe on place cells, together revealing a sophisticated internal positioning system that allows organisms to track their location, orient themselves, and build cognitive maps of their surroundings.

The impact of this work extends beyond the study of spatial navigation. The entorhinal cortex and hippocampus are among the first brain regions affected in Alzheimer's disease, and the spatial disorientation experienced by patients in the early stages of the disease may be linked to dysfunction in the grid cell and place cell systems. This connection has spurred new lines of research into the relationship between spatial cognition and neurodegenerative disease, giving the Mosers' discoveries potential clinical relevance.

The research environment that Edvard and May-Britt Moser built at NTNU has served as a training ground for a generation of neuroscientists. The success of their programme demonstrated that world-leading research could be conducted outside the traditional centres of scientific activity, providing a model for building excellence in unexpected locations. Their work has been cited thousands of times and has influenced research programmes across the globe.

The continued investment in related infrastructure, such as the NORBRAIN national research infrastructure, reflects the lasting institutional impact of the research programme the Mosers established in Trondheim. As of 2025, this infrastructure continues to support research on spatial awareness, memory, and brain function across Norwegian institutions.