Howard Eichenbaum, professor of psychological and brain sciences and director of the BU Center for Memory and Brain, has joined some of the world’s most accomplished thinkers as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is one of the world’s most prestigious honorary societies and a leading center for independent policy research. The society currently boasts over 4,600 fellows and 600 foreign honorary members from a full range of disciplines and professions, including academia, business, science, public affairs, the arts, and the humanities. Members of the 2015 class include winners of the Nobel and Pulitzer Prizes; MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships; and Grammy, Emmy, Oscar, and Tony Awards.
Eichenbaum’s research focuses on how the brain stores and retrieves memories. His studies characterize a brain system composed of the hippocampus and areas of the cerebral cortex that each perform specific functions in memory and contain individual neurons that encode specific features of memories. In particular, Eichenbaum’s recent experiments have identified “time cells,” neurons in the hippocampus that record the flow of time as a specific memory unfolds.
His experiments have shown that the hippocampus uses its record of time, as well as space, to organize networks of related memories that support our ability to retrieve memories and employ memory in solving new problems. These studies have provided insights into the nature of the memory code by explaining how memory is challenged in aging and mental disorders, as well as potentially helping us assess new treatments for memory disorders.
Eichenbaum received his PhD in Psychology from the University of Michigan and also pursued a postdoctoral fellowship in neuroscience at MIT. He has received a National Institute of Mental Health Senior Scientist Award (1997-2002), and was elected as a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science in 2007 and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2008. He also has served on the Council of the Society for Neuroscience, the National Advisory Mental Health Council, and as chair of the section on neuroscience at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is editor-in-chief of the journal Hippocampus, and is a member of the editorial board of 10 research journals and encyclopedias. Eichenbaum has also published over 23 research papers, reviews, and book chapters of his own, and is author or co-author of nine books, including From Conditioning to Conscious Recollection: Memory Systems of the Brain, and The Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory: An Introduction.