Winrich Freiwald receives António Champalimaud Vision Award

Winrich Freiwald, Rockefeller's Denise A. and Eugene W. Chinery Professor, was chosen to receive the 2024 António Champalimaud Vision Award, a prestigious honor recognizing scientists for major breakthroughs in basic or clinical research on vision. He received the award on September 11 at a ceremony in Lisbon, Portugal, and will present a lecture next year at the annual meeting for the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology in Salt Lake City, Utah.

As head of the Laboratory of Neural Systems, Freiwald has made indelible contributions to our understanding of how the brain sees and recognizes faces, including by studying the processes allowing the central nervous system to extract information from a face and generate emotions, drive behavior, and activate memories in response. His work has wide-ranging implications for understanding vision and other modes of perception as well as social cognition at the biological level.

For example, Freiwald's lab has identified a population of neurons in the brain's temporal lobe that selectively respond to familiar faces, linking face perception to long-term memory. They have also elucidated how a structure known as the middle dorsal face area encodes the dynamic information that the brain receives when seeing faces that move, change shape, or shift the gaze.

The António Champalimaud Vision Award is supported by VISION 2020: The Right to Sight, an initiative co-led by the World Health Organization and the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness.