SPACEBRAIN at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)
May-Britt and Edvard Moser established their hippocampal neurophysiology lab at NTNU in 1996, one year after they had received PhDs at the University of Oslo with Professor Per Andersen. CBM was established in 2002 with the Mosers as Directors, together with five prominent research colleagues from Europe and two from the U.S.
In January 2007, Menno Witter, one of the founding members of CBM, accepted a new professorship in neuroanatomy at the Centre. Witter is an expert on the neuroanatomy and microcircuitry of the parahippocampal cortex, including entorhinal cortex. The ambition of the Centre is to understand how information is encoded, stored and used in cortical systems and microcircuits.
A major scientific contribution from CBM was the discovery of grid cells in the entorhinal cortex, which immediately pointed to this region as a hub for the brain network that makes us find our way through the environment. The discovery was followed by the observation that grid coordinates are represented conjunctively with head direction and movement velocity in the deeper layers of medial entorhinal cortex, as well as the discovery that disambiguation of neural representations in the hippocampus is accompanied by a coherent coordinate shift in assemblies of grid cells in the entorhinal cortex.
Together with their collaborators, the Moser-Witter group has revealed several principles of neuronal coding at the population level in the hippocampus.
NTNU will play a major role in the SPACEBRAIN project, as the coordinating institution and the largest supplier of experimental results. The research group will have the responsibility for multi-channel dual-site recordings from the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex in adult and young rats and will perform the neuroanatomical analyses of microcircuitry in these areas.
The Norwegian American physicist and businessman Fred Kavli designated the CBM as a Kavli Institute in 2007. The centre became one of only 15 such institutes worldwide, and the first in Norway. The designation as a Kavli Institute brings both international recognition and important funding.
May-Britt Moser, Menno Witter and Edvard Moser
Centre for the biology of memory (CBM)
The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)