Johannes Letzkus is awarded the Swiss Pfizer Research Prize 2013

The newly appointed Max Planck Research Group Leader received this prize for his investigations on the role of neocortex in emotional learning and the underlying neuronal mechanisms. Johannes Letzkus, currently at the Friedrich Miescher Institute in Basel (Switzerland), will move to the MPI for Brain Research in the summer of this year.

His work, which was published in Nature in 2011, demonstrates that neocortex- the largest and most highly-developed brain region- is essential for the formation of fear memories. In addition, he and his colleagues found that emotional and sensory stimuli converge in neocortex during learning, and identified the underlying neuronal microcircuit.

The prestigious Pfizer Research Prize is awarded annually for outstanding publications by Swiss groups in the field of biomedical research and will be presented during a ceremony in Zürich (Switzerland) on February 7, 2013.