Ann Graybiel received her PhD in Psychology and Brain Science from MTI in 1971 and joined the MTI faculty in 1973. From 1994-2008 she was the Walter A Rosenblith Professor Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. Since 2001 she is the Principle Investigator at the McGovern Institute. In 2008, she was named the Institute Professor, the highest academic award at MIT. Ann Graybiel is recipient of numerous prestigious scientific awards among them the National Medal of Science (2001) and the Killian Award (2002), the highest honor given to an MIT professor. She is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences since 1988 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1991.

Ann Graybiel has revolutionized our understanding of the striatum, (1) initially with her discovery that the striatum has a sophisticated modular architecture, being organized into striosomes and the surrounding matrix, then (2) with her discovery of specific corticostriatal circuits that undergo wide-scale plasticity during learning and can control habitual behaviors, and most recently (3) with her finding that the striosomes that she discovered control decision-making under motivationally challenging conditions. Her work functionally delineating a circuit leading from emotion-related prefrontal cortex through striosomes to dopamine-containing cell clusters in the substantia nigra is extraordinary in documenting a neural circuit related to motivation. Graybiel’s work is directly relevant to a wide range of neurologic and neuropsychiatric conditions, and she is a leading contributor to clinical fields focused on Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease and other conditions in which compulsivity, anxiety and depression are symptoms.

Dr. Greybiel’s laboratory studies the physiology of basal ganglia and their role in guiding normal learning, motivation, habit formation, and decision-making. In 1978, Dr. Graybiel discovered the compartmental architecture of the striatum and plasticity related to habit learning, suggesting that this organization could underlie habit learning. Using milti-electrode techniques, her group was the first to record from ensembles of neurons in the striatum and neocortex of awake, behaving rodents as they learn new tasks and developed habits. They discovered that highly patterned changes in ensemble activity occur in the striatum and neocortex as habits are formed. Furthermore, capitalizing on newly available optogenetic methods, Dr. Graybiel and her group found that they could block the formation of habits and block the expression of already formed habits. Extending this work to a therapeutic model, they discovered that they could selectively block compulsive behavior in a mouse model of compulsive behavior.