June 6, 2002
Jagadeesh wins McKnight Scholar Award
Pamela Wyngate
HS News & Community Relations
Dr. Bharathi Jagadeesh, assistant professor of physiology and biophysics, has been selected for a 2002 McKnight Scholar Award in the Neurosciences for her work on “Plasticity of Object and Scene Selective Neurons in the Primate Inferotemporal Cortex.” Earlier this year Jagadeesh was also named a Sloan Foundation fellow.
Jagadeesh is one of six scientists nationally to receive the McKnight Award. It is a three-year, $225,000 grant awarded to young researchers who are doing innovative work in neuroscience. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation also honors young researchers in selected fields of research. There are currently 100 Sloan Foundation grants awarded annually in six fields: chemistry, computer science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience and physics.
agadeesh’s primary research interest is in the neural basis of visual learning. She and her colleagues investigate the way neurons in the temporal lobe process visual information to generate perceptions of objects and scenes and how the activity is modified by learning and memory. Jagadeesh has also received funding from the University’s Royalty Research Fund, which provides short-term grants to faculty members at the UW. She used these funds to pursue a project on computational definitions of the similarity of complex visual stimuli.
Jagadeesh came to the UW in 1999 after postdoctoral training at the National Institutes of Health and receiving her Ph.D. in neuroscience at Northwestern University. She is a core staff member at the Washington National Primate Research Center.
