Dr. Bharathi Jagadeesh, assistant professor of physiology and biophysics, was chosen for a 2002 McKnight Scholar Award in the Neurosciences. The award supports her work on object and scene selective neurons in the cortex of the brain. Earlier she was named a Sloan Foundation fellow.

Jagadeesh is one of six scientists nationally to receive the McKnight Award for young researchers doing innovative work in neuroscience. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation honors young researchers in chemistry, computer science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience and physics.

Jagadeesh studies the neural basis of visual learning. She and her colleagues investigate the way neurons in the temporal lobe process visual information to generate perceptions of objects and scenes. Her group further examines how learning and memory modify this activity.

Jagadeesh also has received funding from the UW Royalty Research Fund, which provides short-term grants to UW faculty members. The funding comes from a portion of the license and royalty fees earned from UW-developed intellectual property. Jagadeesh used her grant to pursue a project on computational definitions of the similarity of complex visual stimuli.