Marcus E. Raichle, M.D., will receive the 1998 Karl Spencer Lashley Award from the American Philosophical Society at a Nov. 13 dinner at the society's annual meeting in Philadelphia. Raichle and colleague Michael I. Posner, Ph.D., a former Washington University faculty member now at the University of Oregon, will share the award for their contributions to brain imaging.
Raichle, co-director of the Division of Radiological Sciences and professor of radiology, neurology and neurobiology, and Posner, professor of psychology at Oregon, are being recognized for pioneering the use of noninvasive imaging to understand brain function. They are co-authors of a Scientific American volume about this topic called "Images of Mind," which received the 1996 William James Book Award from the American Psychological Association.
The American Philosophical Society, the oldest learned society in the United States, was established by Benjamin Franklin in 1743 to promote scholarly and scientific inquiry. Elected members have included John J. Audubon, Robert Frost and Charles Darwin, and more than 200 Nobel Prize winners have been members since 1901.
A member of the National Academy of Sciences, Raichle and colleagues pioneered the use of positron emission tomography (PET) imaging to map specific brain areas used in tasks such as seeing, hearing, speaking and remembering. Posner, one of the world's leading cognitive psychologists, added his skills to the work when he joined this effort in 1985. PET itself was developed at Washington University during the 1970s to allow researchers to study the living human brain noninvasively and to track and record its function.
Working with colleagues at the University, Raichle and Posner helped develop many of the basic experimental strategies used worldwide to map the human brain with PET and, more recently, with magnetic resonance imaging. These techniques are providing an increasingly sophisticated view of how the normal human brain functions. Maps of brain chemistry and metabolism complement these maps of brain function. In combination, such maps not only tell us how the brain and our behaviors are related, but also how diseases such as stroke, depression, anxiety and Parkinson's disease affect brain function.
Raichle joined the University faculty as a research instructor in neurology in 1971. He received a bachelor's degree from the University of Washington in Seattle in 1960 and a medical degree from the same institution in 1964.
