May-Britt Moser

Grid cells are neurons in the medial entorhinal cortex that fire in a striking hexagonal pattern when an animal moves through space, creating an internal coordinate grid of the environment. May-Britt Moser and her then-husband Edvard Moser discovered them in 2005 while recording from rat brains at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. Each grid cell fires at regularly spaced locations that form the vertices of equilateral triangles tiling the floor of the enclosure.

John O'Keefe had discovered place cells in the hippocampus in 1971, which fire when an animal is at a specific location, acting as a positioning system. Grid cells in the entorhinal cortex provide the metric information—the distance and direction signals—that allow place cells to form stable place fields. Together, the grid-cell and place-cell systems constitute what is widely called the brain's GPS for spatial navigation.

May-Britt Moser shared the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with her then-husband Edvard Moser and with John O'Keefe of University College London. The Mosers each received one quarter of the prize jointly for their grid cell discovery, while O'Keefe received the other half for his earlier discovery of place cells. The Mosers were the fifth married couple to share a Nobel Prize.

Both Mosers conducted their Nobel-winning work at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway. They co-directed the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience and the Centre for Neural Computation at NTNU. May-Britt Moser also served as director of the Centre for Neural Computation before the couple's separation.