This post was updated March 9 at 9:16 p.m.

The National Academy of Sciences will award a UCLA professor of neurobiology in April for deepening understanding of the brain.

Anne Churchland will receive the annual 2025 Pradel Research Award for pioneering exploration into the neural circuits which underpin how the brain integrates information. Churchland also received $50,000 to give to a neuroscience research institution of her choice, which she said she would put toward the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York – where her lab career began.

“I was really excited about the idea of supporting a student there who maybe otherwise wouldn’t have funding and might get the chance to do neuroscience at a really high level,” Churchland said.

The National Academy of Sciences will also recognize her role in supporting other women in neuroscience.

Churchland said she founded Anneslist – a repository of female systems neuroscientists – to serve as a resource for choosing guest speakers. What started as jotting down names on a Google document evolved into a website spotlighting women within the field whose work was largely unnoticed, she said.

Churchland’s lab focuses on decision-making behavior, particularly how animals combine external signals from their environment, such as sights or sounds, with internal information like biases and inferences, she said. She added that the lab’s focus took a slight turn around 2019 when the team discovered that movement neuron signals interact with cognitive neuron signals.

This finding had implications for understanding fidgeting behavior, Churchland said, and movements typically associated with inattention and distractedness are being studied through a new lens.

Letizia Ye, a doctoral student in Churchland’s lab, said their research surrounds how brains interpret and process sensory information and how they interact with the internal state of engagement with a task. Ye added that their work is applicable to students as the practice of focus is central to learning.

“By understanding and analyzing animal behavior via computational models while they are performing these decision-making tasks, we can better understand how that sensory information that they are intaking is then transformed into those appropriate actions,” Ye said.

Churchland’s mentorship has taught them to think critically, Ye said. They added that Churchland encourages students to acknowledge and address the assumptions underlying their data.

Michael Ryan, a postdoctoral researcher in Churchland’s lab, said his research focuses on how decision-making processes change over time. This work could translate to understanding shifts within brain regions, cells and circuits, and underlying altered human decision-making processes, he added.

Ryan said Churchland is skilled at balancing giving her mentees support and pushing them to grow. Churchland said the lab is structured so that every researcher is together in one big room to allow for close collaboration.

“It’s a very rare skill to be good at mentoring because it’s not something that they teach you in grad school,” Ryan said.

Churchland said she is looking forward to strengthening the understanding of altered sensory experiences and how atypical human brains integrate sensory signals differently. She added that another interesting application involves how movement – such as the hyperactivity characteristic of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder – relates to cognitive processing.

“If we work together and help each other and share ideas and share code and share expertise then I think we can all get to where we are going faster,” Churchland said. “I really try to encourage people to work together and to teach each other what they know on the idea that will benefit everybody’s project and everybody’s science.”