ANN GRAYBIEL
WALTER A. ROSENBLITH PROFESSOR OF SCIENCE
MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

[Biography | Honorary Degree]

When ANN GRAYBIEL attended school in Pensacola, Fla., science wasn’t taught until the ninth grade, and even then, only boys were allowed to take science. So Graybiel was sent to a home economics class, where she learned how to sew. Sewing, it turns out, was but a blip in Graybiel’s academic career. She went on to study chemistry and biology at Harvard, earned a master’s degree in biology as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at Tufts University and a Ph.D. in psychology and brain science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Today she is considered a world expert on the basal ganglia, the complex and inaccessible parts of the brain that are affected in disorders such as Parkinson’s and Huntington’s diseases. Her curriculum vitae, filled with numerous awards and honors and more than 200 publications, is nearly 30 pages long.

Graybiel is the Walter A. Rosenblith Professor of Science at MIT and the recipient of the 2001 National Medal of Science, a presidential award that honors the country’s most extraordinary scientists. In 2002, she also received MIT’s highest faculty honor, the James R. Killian Jr. Faculty Achievement Award. She has served on nearly two dozen advisory boards for organizations dealing with neuroscience, mental health and brain disorders and has served on the editorial board of more than a dozen scientific journals.

An MIT colleague told The Boston Globe in 2002 that “Ann has single-handedly transformed the study of this part [basal ganglia] of the brain. She is the acknowledged leader in the study of the large and complex part of the brain involved in movement.” Another MIT colleague, Nancy Hopkins, who was in the same class with Graybiel at Harvard-Radcliffe, said that in college, Graybiel seemed “the smartest person in the world…In a room of 400 students after a lecture in physics at Harvard left most people in a stupor, one hand would shoot up, and someone would ask a brilliant question. That was Ann Graybiel.”

When Graybiel won the Killian Award at MIT, the decree said, in part, that she has had “a profound impact on research on the functional anatomy and physiology of the brain. She and her group made the pioneering discovery of the fundamental architecture of the large forebrain region known as the basal ganglia and delineated the neurochemical organization of the system of neurotransmitters there. This work is of great significance because it represents the first time that a mechanism for directed neurochemical control of complex brain circuits was demonstrated. Recognition of this work is worldwide by neurologists and psychiatrists as well as basic scientists…this work is of truly fundamental human importance.”

The basal ganglia are structures that modify movement on a minute-to-minute basis. When they are altered, a person may have involuntary movements such as spasms or tics. In addition to several motor-system diseases, a range of neuropsychiatric disorders such as Tourette’s syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder and attention deficit disorder are related to basal ganglia dysfunction.

When the basal ganglia are operating normally, they control something we can all relate to: habits. Learning a habit, Graybiel says, requires brain power from both the cortex and the basal ganglia. After numerous repetitions, a habit is formed in the basal ganglia, and then the behavior can occur automatically, freeing the brain for other functions. When you brush your teeth, for example, you don’t think about each motion, but go into automatic pilot, carrying out the necessary steps.

In 1999, Graybiel and her colleagues found evidence that learning new behaviors actually changes the basal ganglia. As laboratory rats learned a specific sequence of movements that led to a reward, she and her coworkers saw for the first time the striking changes that occur during habit learning in the part of the basal ganglia known as the striatum. The results of this research support the idea that while learning habits, the brain codes whole sequences of behavior as units, or chunks, which can be triggered by specific contexts. For example, when the traffic light turns green, the driver presses the gas pedal and starts to drive.

Graybiel’s work also applies to drug addiction. “Addictions,” she once said, “are habits that have become overwhelmingly compelling, so that they dominate us instead of freeing us to do other things.”

“Learning more about dynamic changes that occur in the brain as we make and break habits has great therapeutic potential,” she told an MIT publication. “We may learn, for example, what a harmless habit has in common with an addiction, and what is different about the two. This is a subject that interests us all.”

Graybiel will be awarded an honorary Doctor of Science degree.