Valentin Dragoi, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Neurobiology and Anatomy at The University of Texas Medical School at Houston, is one of 17 recipients recently selected to receive the prestigious National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s Pioneer Award.
The award will provide funding for Dr Dragoi’s groundbreaking proposal to examine population coding underlying complex behavior in freely moving primates.
The NIH Director’s Pioneer Awards are designed to support individual scientists of exceptional creativity who propose pioneering – and possibly transforming approaches – to major challenges in biomedical and behavioral research. The term “pioneering” is used to describe highly innovative approaches that have the potential to produce an unusually high impact on a broad area of biomedical or behavioral research, and the term “award” is used to mean a grant for conducting research, rather than a reward for past achievements. To be considered pioneering, the proposed research must reflect ideas substantially different from those already being pursued in the investigator’s laboratory or elsewhere.