O’Keefe, John (1939-…), an American-born British neurobiologist, won the 2014 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine. A neurobiologist is a scientist who studies the brain and the rest of the nervous system. O’Keefe shared the prize with the Norwegian scientists Edvard and May-Britt Moser. The three scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize for their discoveries concerning how animals, including humans, know where they are in their environment and find their way from place to place.
Working with rats, O´Keefe discovered part of the brain that creates a positioning system. He found that certain nerve cells in an area of the brain called the hippocampus were active when a rat was in a certain place. When the rat moved to another location in the same room, other nearby nerve cells activated. The nerve cells he identified, called place cells, create a mental map of the room. Similar cells in other animals, including humans, work to enable animals to know their location and navigate within their environment.
O’Keefe was born on Nov. 18, 1939, in New York City. He studied psychology at City College of New York, graduating in 1963. He received his Ph.D. degree at McGill University in Montreal in 1967. That same year, he began research at University College London, where he became professor in 1987. O’Keefe is director of the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour at University College London.
