Professor Dr May-Britt Moser

Research Priorities: Neuroscience, mechanism for spatial orientation, natural navigation system, grid cells, speed cells, Alzheimer’s research
May-Britt Moser is a neuroscientist. She is known for her work on spatial orientation and spatial memory. Together with Edvard Moser she discovered a type of brain cell (grid cells), which enables precise orientation in space. This made it possible to demonstrate thinking capacity at a neuronal level for the first time. For the discovery of grid cells May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2014, together with John O’Keefe.
May-Britt Moser researches computational and information-processing functions in the brain and cognitive behaviour derived therefrom. Her research is focused on orientation in space. Together with Edvard Moser she discovered previously unknown nerve cells in the brains of rats, so-called grid cells. Grid cells work like an internal navigation system. They place a virtual coordinate grid of hexagons over the perceived environment and the brain uses this grid to calculate the position in space. Both researchers were thus able to demonstrate thinking capacity at a neuronal level for the first time. In further studies they also identified “border cells”. These become active when animals approach obstacles and walls.
May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser thus revealed essential principles of the orientation system in rodents. The grid and border cells they discovered are involved in interaction with other cells. These include head direction cells, a kind of compass, and place cells, which fire signals when the animal passes known locations and landmarks. Together, the different cell types are assumed to create a kind of map of the spatial environment. In more recent work, both researchers have also discovered cells that indicate walking speed, known as speed cells. For this they investigated the brain activity of rats at different walking speeds. As speed increases the speed cells become more active. 
For the discovery of grid cells, May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2014. They share the award with the British-US neuroscientist John O‘Keefe, who identified place cells of the brain. The results of research by May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser could advance research into Alzheimer’s disease, because brain areas relating to orientation are the first to be affected by Alzheimer’s. 
A remarkable finding of recent years is the discovery of a signal for “episodic time” in the lateral entorhinal cortex (LED), a sister region of the medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) for spatial coding. The LEC marks the time between the signal and the actual experience of a message which is referred to as an episode. Until now it has been assumed that mainly spatial information is sent by grid cells in the MEC to place cells in the hippocampus. Now May-Britt Moser has been able to show that it is mainly the precise timing of neuronal activity in the hippocampus that depends on signals from the MEC.
These findings on the internal navigation system shed new light on neurological diseases, in which the precise timing of neural activities is disturbed, as in Alzheimer’s dementia, schizophrenia or after a stroke and brain injuries.