CNS 2026 | The 15^th Annual Distinguished Career Contributions Award (DCC)

Congratulations to Dr. Carol A. Barnes, our 2026 Annual Distinguished Career Contributions in Cognitive Neuroscience Awardee. Dr. Barnes will accept this prestigious award and deliver her lecture in Vancouver, BC, Canada, March 9, 2026 in the Grand Ballroom of the JW Marriott Parq Vancouver. 

Why study normative cognitive aging when it is not a disease?

Carol Barnes, Ph.D.

Regents Professor in the Departments of Psychology, Neurology and Neuroscience, the Evelyn F. McKnight Endowed Chair for Learning and Memory in Aging, and Director of the Evelyn F. McKnight Brain Institute at the University of Arizona.

Monday, March 9, 2026, 4:30 - 5:30 pm, Parq Grand Ballroom

Animal models have been used to explore changes in the brain that might contribute to the underlying causes of normative age-related memory impairment.  The hippocampus has been a useful neural system to study for gaining insights into what brain and cognitive changes are to be expected during the aging process.  For example, healthy older humans, nonhuman primates and rodents all show poorer hippocampus-dependent spatial memory and navigation ability than do their younger counterparts.  Remarkably, these age-related changes begin to occur at a point in the lifespan that the species is considered to be “old”.   This suggests that neurobiological changes that contribute to memory alterations across time are accelerated in shorter-lived species such as the rat, compared to humans.  Central in the search for the fundamental contributors to memory changes that occur across the lifespan is synapse structure, function, and plasticity, and those mechanisms that act to support synapses.  Alterations in synapse function and memory circuits are highly specific to subregions and cell types, rather than uniform across brain regions, making the search for interventions complex.  Nevertheless, discovering how to support synaptic health in circuits critical for memory will be key for facilitating treatment strategies that aim to optimize cognition.  At least two compelling reasons can be offered to support the idea that it is critical to understand the normative aging brain.  First, most neurodegenerative diseases are superimposed on an aging brain.  Thus, discovering the reasons for this age-related vulnerability may provide clues for disease prevention.  Second, because epidemiological data indicate that most of us will age normatively, this also presents the possibility that resilience factors against disease can be discovered, as well as factors that optimize cognitive health in those who are aging normatively.  At the very least it is important to understand the normal aging brain well enough so that these states can be distinguished from pathological conditions.

About

Carol A. Barnes is a Regents Professor in the Departments of Psychology, Neurology and Neuroscience, the Evelyn F. McKnight Endowed Chair for Learning and Memory in Aging, and Director of the Evelyn F. McKnight Brain Institute at the University of Arizona.  Barnes is past president of the Society for Neuroscience, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Foreign Member of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters.  She is the recipient of the 2013 Gerard Prize in Neuroscience and the 2014 American Psychological Association Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions.

The central goal of Barnes’ research program is to understand how the brain changes during normative aging and what the functional consequences of this are for memory.  Her research program involves behavioral, electrophysiological and molecular biological approaches to the study of young and aged rodents, non-human primates, and more recently a human project (the Precision Aging Network) that studies normative human brain aging, with the goal of optimizing cognitive healthspan across the lifespan.  She has published a number of manuscripts that are now classic references on brain aging and behavior (302 total, H index 116).

 

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Previous Winner of the Distinguished Career Contributions Award:

2025 Marie T. Banich, Ph.D., University of Colorado at Boulder
2024 Kia Nobre, Ph.D., Yale University
2023 Mark D'Esposito, MD, University of California, Berkeley
2022 John Jonides, Ph.D., University of Michigan
2021 Robert Desimone, Ph.D., McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT
2020 Marlene Behrmann, Ph.D., Carnegie Mellon University
2019 Daniel L. Schacter, Ph.D., Harvard University
2018 Alfonso Caramazza, Harvard University
2017 Marcia K. Johnson, Yale University
2016 James Haxby, University of Trento, Dartmouth College
2015 Marta Kutas, Ph.D., University of California, San Diego
2014 Marsel Mesulam, M.D., Northwestern University
2013 Robert T. Knight, M.D., University of California, Berkeley
2012 Morris Moscovitch, Ph.D., University of Toronto