Winrich Freiwald wins 2025 Rosenstiel Award

Winrich Freiwald, a scientist who studies the neural pathways that underlie facial recognition, will receive the 2025 Lewis S. Rosenstiel Award for Distinguished Work in Basic Medical Research given by Brandeis University. Freiwald shares the highly prestigious award with Nancy Kanwisher of MIT, Margaret Livingstone of Harvard Medical School, and Doris Tsao of The University of California Berkeley.

Freiwald, Rockefeller’s Denise A. and Eugene W. Chinery Professor and head of the Laboratory of Neural Systems, is recognized for his pioneering contributions to the discovery of patches of neurons in the temporal lobe of the brain that are exclusively activated by faces in the visual field and which process different facial features that drive social responses and evoke emotions and memories. He has found that projections from these patches link in a network that is dedicated to recognizing and analyzing social interactions. He has also discovered a novel class of neurons that link face perception to long-term memory, allowing us to distinguish between people we have and have not seen before.

Freiwald’s findings have profound implications for understanding how the brain translates visual perception into cognition and behavior. Taken together, studies conducted by the four Rosenstiel recipients are helping to illuminate brain mechanisms underlying social interaction and cognition.

Seven current and former Rockefeller scientists are previous recipients of the Rosenstiel Award: Titia de Lange in 2017, C. David Allis in 2010, Fernando Nottebohm in 2003, Roderick MacKinnon in 1999, A. James Hudspeth in 1996, Robert Roeder in 1994, and Paul Nurse in 1992.