State of South Tyrol supports Valentin Braitenberg Award
Through an agreement with the Bernstein Network, the province of South Tyrol supports this scientific award. The state government gave the go-ahead today.
Valentin Braitenberg © Almut Schüz
/Südtiroler Landesverwaltung, sf, jw/ BN, Duppé/ Since 2014, the province of South Tyrol has been sponsoring the Valentin Braitenberg Awardfor Computational Neuroscience. This is an international research award named after the brain researcher and cybernetic researcher who was born in Bolzano in 1926 and died in Tübingen in 2011. Today (10th March), the state government approved a draft agreement between the state and the Bernstein Network Computational Neuroscience, which regulates the cooperation and awarding of the prize. The Governor and State Councillor for Research and Innovation, Arno Kompatscher, was authorised to sign the agreement.
The Bernstein Network announces the “Valentin Braitenberg Award for Computational Neuroscience” every two years. The prize is currently endowed with € 5000. The Bernstein Network selects the prizewinner based on the importance of the research work for the neurosciences. Through the agreement approved today, the Province of South Tyrol will participate in the foundation and the awarding of the prize – initially until 2023. The call for nominations for the 2020 award is currently open.
According to Governor Kompatscher, the state hopes that the links with the Bernstein Network will lead to “a better positioning in the international context of the neurosciences, in particular with regard to potential synergies between members of the network and, for example, the Institute of Biomedicine at the Eurac or the training programmes for physicians that are planned in South Tyrol”.
“I am extremely pleased that the autonomous province of Bolzano-South Tyrol continues to support the Valentin Braitenberg Award and that we can continue the award’s success story together,” said Susanne Schreiber, Chair of the Bernstein Network Computational Neuroscience. “It bears the name of the scientist who is a pioneer in our field, Computational Neuroscience. Valentin Braitenberg’s research was interdisciplinary and thrived on the interaction of biological and theoretical approaches. Valentin Braitenberg made a major contribution to the development of biological cybernetics, which in turn inspired robotics and artificial intelligence unto this day.”
The Bernstein Network is a registered association in the Federal Republic of Germany for the promotion of computational neuroscience. It started in 2004 through an extensive funding initiative of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.
The most recent Braitenberg Award for Computational Neuroscience was presented in 2018 to the neuroscientist Wulfram Gerstner. He developed an artificial brain at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) whose neurons can communicate with each other through electrical pulses.
