Professor John O’Keefe

Professor John O'Keefe is the Director of the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour at University College London and is the receipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2014, for “for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain”, together with May-Britt Moser and Edwards Moser.

John O'Keefe was born in New York City, and has dual US-British citizenship. He received a PhD in physiological psychology at McGill University in Montreal, Canada in 1967, and then moved to England to do research at University College London. He stayed in London and in 1987 was appointed professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College. John O'Keefe is currently director of the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour at University College.

The awareness of one’s location and how to find the way to other places is crucial for both humans and animals. To understand the ability to orient ourselves in space, John O’Keefe studied the movements of rats and signals from nerve cells in the hippocampus, an area located in the center of the brain. In 1971 he discovered that when a rat was at a certain location in a room, certain cells were activated, and that when the rat moved to another location, other cells became activated. That is to say, the cells form a kind of internal map of the room.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1992 and a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci) in 1998. In addition, he received the Feldberg Foundation Prize in 2001 and the Grawemeyer Award in psychology in 2006 (with Lynn Nadel). In 2007, he received the British Neuroscience Association Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Neuroscience and in 2008 he received the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies European Journal of Neuroscience Award. Later in 2008, O'Keefe was awarded the Gruber Prize in Neuroscience. He was appointed as the inaugural director of the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour. In 2013 he received the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize (with Edvard Moser and May-Britt Moser). In 2014, he was a co-recipient of the Kavli Prize awarded by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters with Brenda Milner and Marcus Raichle. In 2016 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. In 2019, he was admitted to the Royal Irish Academy as an honorary member.

He received an honorary Doctor of Science degree from University College Cork. In May 2015, he received one from The City College of New York, and in June of the same year, he was awarded one from McGill University, both his alma maters.

In 2014 he received the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience "for the discovery of specialized brain networks for memory and cognition", together with Brenda Milner and Marcus Raichle.