Brain Structure & Function Award

Brain Structure and Function Editor's Award

Brain Structure and Function, in collaboration with the esteemed Cajal Club, has instituted an annual 'Editors' Choice Award'. This prestigious award will be presented at the annual Society for Neuroscience (SfN) conference. Our senior editorial team meticulously reviews each publication from the preceding year, honoring the authors of the most outstanding article with this accolade. This initiative underscores our commitment to celebrating groundbreaking neuroscientific research and the brilliant minds propelling our understanding of the brain's structure and function forward. We are delighted to recognize and commemorate the exceptional contributions of our community at the SfN annual conferences.

This is a portrait of Michael Bohlen, PhD.

Martin Bohlen, PhD
2026 Award Recipient

Dr. Martin Bohlen's award-winning research examines how oculomotor and abducens internuclear pathways communicate with the cerebellum and contribute to eye movement control. Traditionally understood as neurons that coordinate horizontal movements between the two eyes, oculomotor and abducens internuclear neurons also send efference copy signals beyond their conventional motoneuron targets. His two studies demonstrate that these neurons project to the paramedian tract (PMT) cell groups, a set of precerebellar nuclei, and provide inputs to the flocculus and fastigial nucleus, two cerebellar structures important for refining conjugate and vergence eye movements. Together, these findings reveal a unified, bilateral pathway through which the brainstem communicates eye movement commands to the cerebellum, potentially enabling it to compare intended and actual eye movements and fine-tune their coordination in real time.

Links to award winning papers on precerebellar paramedian tract cell group connections:

I. Oculomotor internuclear projections.

II. Abducens internuclear inputs.

Previous winners have included:

2025 | Winner

Carmen Cavada, Department of Anatomy, Histology and Neuroscience at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM), Spain
- "Immunohistochemical field parcellation of the human hippocampus along its antero-posterior axis."

2024 | Winner

Eric Sobierajski, University of Bochum, Germany
- "Development of Myelin in Fetal and Postnatal Neocortex of the Pig, the European Wild Boar (Sus scrofa),"

2023 | Winner

Alisa Junakovic, School of Medicine, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
- “Laminar dynamics of deep projection neurons and mode of subplate formation are hallmarks of histogenetic subdivisions of the human cingulate cortex before onset of arealization’

2023 | Runner-up

Lara Lopez-Gonzales, School of Medicine, University of Murcia, Murcia, Spain
- ‘Populational heterogeneity and partial migratory origin of the ventromedial hypothalamic nucleus: genoarchitectonic analysis in the mouse’

2022 | Winner