Julia Sliwa, CNRS researcher at the Institut du Cerveau – ICM, received the Peter and Patricia Gruber International Award at the Society for Neuroscience meeting for her research.
The Gruber Foundation presented the Peter and Patricia Gruber International Research Prize to Dr. Julia Sliwa, CNRS Research Fellow at Institut du Cerveau – ICM, and Dr. Antonio Fernandez-Ruiz from New York University. The award ceremony took place on October 20 in Chicago, at the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) conference.
This award recognizes two young neuroscientists for their outstanding work in an international context.
This award is given to Dr. Sliwa for the work carried out between 2012 and 2018 at the Rockefeller University of New York in Professor Freiwald’s laboratory. She discovered brain areas in monkeys modulated by social interactions in parts of the brain which support the most high-level forms of social cognition in humans: the attribution of mental states to others. She showed how social interactions modulate brain areas dedicated to face perception and proposed a new interpretation of the “mirror system network” that includes circuits recruited by both social and non-social content.
Julia Sliwa uses functional MRI, neurophysiological recordings and cross-species comparisons. Her research is now focused on our neural representations of social concepts and the understanding of gestures during social learning in physiological conditions and neurological disorders.