May-Britt Moser

Design by Adrienne Tong

Born in Fosnavåg, Norway in 1963, May-Britt Moser grew up on a sheep farm. She went on to study psychology, mathematics, and neurobiology at the University of Oslo. Moser’s research concentrated on hippocampal formation and spatial learning in rats, earning her PhD in neurophysiology in 1995.

Moser obtained a teaching position at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway, where she continued her research into place cells in the hippocampus. In 2005, Moser helped discover cells in the entorhinal cortex – dubbed “grid cells” — that play a key role in determining position and navigating spaces. This breakthrough, and the previous discovery of place cells from mentor John O’Keefe, landed her, O’Keefe, and collaborator Edvard I. Moser a 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for studies of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain.

Moser played a significant role in the creation of NTNU’s Centre for the Biology of Memory in 2002 and the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience in 2007. Today, she is the founding director of the Centre for Algorithms in the Cortex and co-director of the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience at NTNU.