Computation and Neural Systems Graduate Scholar Recognized with Gruber International Research Award

Aditya Nair, a graduate scholar in Caltech's Computation and Neural Systems program, has been selected as the recipient of the 2024 Peter and Patricia Gruber International Research Award from the Society for Neuroscience. The award, supported by The Gruber Foundation and established in 2005, recognizes up to three early career neuroscientists for outstanding research and educational pursuit in an international setting.

Nair, who is also a National Science Scholar of the Agency of Science, Technology and Research in Singapore, conducts research in the Caltech laboratory of David Anderson, the Seymour Benzer Professor of Biology, Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, and director and Leadership Chair of the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience.

Nair aims to redefine the way we think of emotional behaviors and neuropsychiatric disorders by studying emotions, like aggression, through the lens of dynamical systems and machine learning. In 2023, he led a study, published in the journal Cell, to identify the unique neural mechanisms underlying aggression in mice, using a machine learning model to reveal a network computation that encodes the persistence and intensity of a state of aggression. In recent work, performed in close collaboration with members of the Anderson lab, Nair helped reveal the neural mechanisms that underlie this computation in a series of three papers published in September 2024 in the journals Nature and Cell.

"Adi's work has opened up a whole new line of investigation in my lab that has already resulted in four major publications and which will keep us busy for many years," says Anderson.

Nair received his undergraduate degree from the National University of Singapore, where he studied molecular pathways underlying Parkinson's disease and the neural circuits of the claustrum, a brain structure thought to act as a hub connecting different parts of the brain.

"It's an honor to get an award that recognizes the journey we go on across the world to do science," Nair says. "These discoveries have the potential to reconceptualize mental health disorders as impaired neural computations. By doing so, I hope we can begin embracing the diversity in how these disorders are expressed and begin moving toward new ways to treat them."