Young Investigator Award Winner 2024: Dr Avital Hahamy
We are delighted to announce that Dr Avital Hahamy has been awarded the Brainbox Initiative Young Investigator Award 2024 for her exceptional research on naturalistic experiences.
Dr Avital Hahamy uses fMRI to study real-world behaviours and associated brain activity in both neurotypical individuals and clinical populations (e.g. individuals with autism, schizophrenia, congenital hand absence). Her work has been supported by numerous awards and fellowships, including a Human Frontier Science Program Postdoctoral Fellowship, an EMBO Long-Term Fellowship, and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Individual Fellowship.
She holds a Ph.D. in Neurobiology from the Weizmann Institute of Science, where she worked with Rafael Malach. She is completing her postdoctoral research in Tim Behrens' lab at the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging at UCL and will soon start her own lab as a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL.
Dr Avital Hahamy joined us for the Brainbox Initiative Conference 2024, during which she delved deep into her notable research in naturalistic experiences. Her work aims to understand how our brains operate in everyday situations, moving beyond controlled experimental environments. Throughout her career, Dr Hahamy has focused on elements that shape our daily lives, such as spontaneous behaviour, the brain's resting state, the function of the sensorimotor network, and how we navigate our spatial and conceptual domains.
Dr Hahamy captivated the conference attendees with her passion for this research, further establishing herself as a deserving recipient of the Brainbox Initiative Young Investigator Award. We’d like to congratulate her again as we eagerly anticipate her future contributions to the field.
The Brainbox Initiative’s Young Investigator Award was founded in 2017 to help stimulate, promote, and reward the groundbreaking research that is being carried out every day by early-career neuroscientists using pioneering non-invasive brain stimulation and imaging techniques. Every year we receive a fantastic amount of high-quality research from neuroscientists at universities around the world, and we are extremely pleased to present Dr Avital Hahamy with the 2024 award.