O’Keefe is a British-American neuroscientist who contributed to the discovery of place cells in the hippocampus of the brain and elucidated their role in cognitive (spatial) mapping. O’Keefe’s investigations of impairments in the cognitive mapping abilities of rats had important implications for the understanding of Alzheimer disease and other human neurological conditions in which affected persons fail to recognise their surroundings. For his contributions to the understanding of neural processes involved in the mental representation of spatial environments, O’Keefe shared the 2014 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Norwegian neuroscientists May-Britt Moser and Edvard I. Moser. O’Keefe studied aeronautical engineering at New York University before enrolling in 1960 at the City College of New York (CCNY) to study philosophy of the mind. After earning a bachelor’s degree from CCNY in 1963, he went to McGill University in Montreal, where he completed a doctorate degree in physiological psychology in 1967, that same year joining University College London (UCL) as a postdoctoral research fellow. He remained at UCL for the duration of his career, eventually serving as a professor of cognitive neuroscience. In addition to the Nobel Prize, O’Keefe was the recipient of other prestigious awards, including the 2013 Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize (shared with the Mosers) and the 2014 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience (shared with Canadian neuropsychologist Brenda Milner and American neurologist Marcus Raichle). O’Keefe was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1992 and of the U.K. Academy of Medical Sciences in 1998. In 2016 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

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