Aditya Nair wins Gruber International Research Award

Aditya Nair, an Indian American graduate scholar at the California Institute of Technology’s (Caltech) Computation and Neural Systems program, has won the the 2024 Peter and Patricia Gruber International Research Award from the Society for Neuroscience.

Nair, who is also a National Science Scholar of the Agency of Science, Technology and Research in Singapore, has been recognized with two others for using advanced technologies to investigate the different brain pathways involved in social behaviors.

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. It includes a $25,000 prize and travel to the SfN annual meeting.

Nair’s graduate research combines neurobiology and machine learning to explore how the brain controls social behaviors that are disrupted in a wide range of developmental and mental health conditions, according to an SfN release.

Originally from Singapore and India, Nair’s interdisciplinary work provides a theoretical framework of how emotional states are encoded in the brain, deepening our understanding of the persistence and intensity of complex behaviors such as aggression, it says

His computational expertise enabled him to provide the first demonstration that an aggressive state in a mouse is encoded in the emergent dynamics of neural populations in a brain area called the ventromedial hypothalamus. This finding represents a new way of thinking about the hypothalamus and suggests that a common network computation is used to encode diverse affective states.

Nair’s research also reveals that this computation is influenced by hormones and neuropeptides, offering insights into mechanisms used to implement long time-scale signals in the brain. His research raises new questions about how our internal affective states are influenced by genes, environmental factors, and neuropsychiatric drugs.

Nair plans to return to Singapore as a principal investigator at the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology (IMCB), A*STAR, where he hopes to investigate how internal affective states are altered in a wide range of mental health conditions.

Nair 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.

He 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, according to a Caltech release.

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.”