NAS Honors Anthropologist Hrdy, Psychologists Rutishauser, Saxe

Several social and behavioral scientists received awards from the National Academy of Sciences earlier this year.

Troland Research Awards
The Troland Research Awards, named for physicist Leonard T. Troland, honors two investigators under the age of 40 who have already made significant achievements within the broad spectrum of experimental psychology. Each recipient is presented with a $50,000 prize to support their research.

This year the award went to Ueli Rutishauser, assistant professor of neurosurgery, department of neurosurgery at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, and Rebecca Saxe, associate professor, department of brain and cognitive sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Rutishauser was selected for innovative experimental and computational studies to understand human perception and memory. Saxe was chosen for discovering the part of the human brain specialized for understanding what other people are thinking.

NAS Award for Scientific Reviewing
The annual NAS Award for Scientific Reviewing this year has gone to University of California, Davis anthropologist Sarah B. Hrdy for her work writing reviews on human biosocial interaction. The award, which rotates each year between the physical, biological and social sciences, is supported by Annual Reviews in honor of its founder, biochemist and historian J. Murray Luck; the award comes with a $10,000 prize.

In her citation, Hrdy is lauded “for her insightful and visionary synthesis of a broad range of data and concepts from across the social and biological sciences to illuminate the importance of biosocial processes among mothers, infants, and other social actors in forming the evolutionary crucible of human societies.”