Sara A. Solla is a theoretical physicist and neuroscientist. Her research draws on conceptual frameworks, mathematical techniques, and numerical tools from statistical physics to tackle problems in theoretical and computational neuroscience at the systems level. Solla earned her M.Sc. in physics from the University of Buenos Aires in her native Argentina in 1974, and her Ph.D. in physics from the University of Washington in Seattle, USA in 1982. Since then, she has authored around 100 scientific publications and delivered more than 500 invited talks at conferences and academic institutions worldwide; her work has been cited over 15,000 times.

Now, Solla has been named the recipient of the 2025 Valentin Braitenberg Award for Computational Neuroscience, recognizing her outstanding contributions to the field. “It is a great honor,” Solla said upon receiving the news, “one that I am delighted to receive given the great influence that the writings of Valentin Braitenberg had on me when I began to learn about the brain.” 

Solla’s shift from physics to neuroscience began in the early 1980s. While doing post-doctoral research at Cornell University, she heard John Hopfield (winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics 2024) talk about memory storage and recall in the brain – and her life and career were forever changed. She went on to spend over a decade in the legendary neural networks group at AT&T Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, but transitioned fully to neuroscience in 1997, when she joined the faculty at Northwestern University. There she continues to serve as a joint professor of neuroscience and of physics and astronomy to this day.

Solla’s research interests lie in theoretical and computational neuroscience, learning theory, and the emergent properties of complex systems (such as result from the collective activity of interconnected neurons in the brain). She has extensively studied artificial neural networks – computational models whose function is inspired by how the human brain stores and processes information. She has worked to characterize the performance of machine learning algorithms used to train these networks for classification and regression tasks. The award committee recognizes her as “a pioneer in the field of network modeling”, known for applying her mathematical background to address questions relevant not only to theorists like herself, but also to experimental neuroscientists. Currently, her work focuses on the neural processes underlying sensory processing, decision-making, and movement control.

Beyond her research, Solla is an active contributor to the international scientific community and involved in professional societies such as the Society for Neuroscience, the International Neural Network Society, and the Organization for Computational Neuroscience. Her ties to Europe include the International Center for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, the Göttingen Graduate School for Neurosciences and Molecular Biosciences in Germany, and the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway. Her career has been previously recognized through her election to the American Physical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Network Science Society.

In addition to being an outstanding researcher, Solla is also a “dedicated teacher, heavily involved in educating the young” (the award committee), who has mentored numerous next-generation scientists now thriving in their fields. She is an active participant in the graduate training program in Neuroscience at Northwestern University and has held visiting professorships at numerous universities in the US, including Columbia University and Rockefeller University in New York City, and Europe, such as the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, France, the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self Organization in Göttingen, and the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark. Since 1999, she has also served as a resident faculty member at the Methods in Computational Neuroscience summer course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. More recently, she also lectures at the summer school on Mathematical Methods in Computational Neuroscience at the Fred Kavli Knowledge Center in Eresfjord, Norway.

The Valentin Braitenberg Award will be formally presented to Sara A. Solla at the Bernstein Conference on Tuesday, September 30, 2025. Following the award ceremony, Solla will deliver the Valentin Braitenberg Lecture, in which she will present highlights of her research.

The Valentin Braitenberg Award

The award is named after Valentin Braitenberg (1926, Bozen – 2011, Tübingen), one of the founding directors of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics (Tübingen, Germany). Braitenberg’s research area was the fine structure of the brain and its functional principles; his groundbreaking work focused on the cerebral and cerebellar cortex.

With the financial support of the “Autonome Provinz Bozen Südtirol”, the Valentin Braitenberg Award for Computational Neuroscience is now conferred every other year by the Bernstein Network within the framework of the Bernstein Conference.