Princeton professors Mala Murthy and Sebastian Seung, along with John White and Gerald Rubin, have been awarded the 24th annual Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences. The award recognizes their work on reconstructing and interpreting connectomes, which are detailed maps of neural connections that help explain how nervous systems process information.
H. Robert Horvitz, a Nobel laureate and member of the Wiley Prize jury, stated, “Understanding a connectome is essential to understanding the nature and logic of a nervous system and hence how it functions to respond to stimuli in the environment and control behavior and other physiological outputs, how it develops and can be modified with experience and age, and how it might dysfunction in disease.”
Sebastian Seung serves as the Anthony B. Evnin Professor at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute (PNI) and Department of Computer Science. He authored “Connectome: How the Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are” in 2012 to introduce nonexperts to neuroscience concepts.
“In the beginning, connectomics was quite controversial, but this award suggests that it’s becoming mainstream,” said Seung. “I read about scientific revolutions when I was a youngster, but I didn’t realize I would participate in two — one in deep learning and one in connectomics. A scientific revolution is when everybody first thinks an idea is wrong, and then later on, everybody thinks it’s right. That’s rare in science, but it happens — and now these two revolutions are intertwined.”
Mala Murthy directs PNI at Princeton as the Karol and Marnie Marcin ‘96 Professor of Neuroscience. Her expertise in fruit fly neuroscience combined with Seung’s knowledge of neural networks led to their 2024 announcement of the first complete brain map of an adult fruit fly through collaboration with FlyWire.
“I feel very humbled and honored by this prize,” said Murthy. “The big surprise to me is how quickly this achievement has been recognized. Usually it takes decades for something you’ve worked on to percolate through the field, for people to appreciate the utility of it. I think it speaks to how useful the connectome has been to fly research — not only to understand flies, but because solving how any brain processes sensory information, makes decisions, learns something, executes actions, is important. It’s clear now how a map of the brain can lead to fundamental discoveries about how brains work. And I think the fly field, which I’m very proud to be a part of, has made that very, very clear.”
John White is an emeritus professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison who mapped C. elegans’ nervous system decades ago; Gerald Rubin leads research at Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus where he directed efforts competing with Princeton’s FlyWire project for mapping an adult fruit fly brain.
Seung noted that honoring all four scientists highlights both the long history behind this area—dating back to White’s early work—and ongoing skepticism that eventually gives way as new ideas prove valuable: “By awarding this to all four of us, the prize recognizes the long history of this work, starting with the worm in the ’70s and ’80s, and it reminds us that this prize really is about the efforts of a lot of people over a long period of time,” he said. “The second thing is, it reminds you that at the beginning of an idea, people might pooh-pooh it and say that it’s the wrong idea, and it could take a long time to prove that it’s actually worth something.”
Recent achievements by Murthy and Seung include reconstructing part of a mouse’s visual cortex connectome as part of MICrONS consortium work announced in April 2025—covering nearly 76,000 neurons—and publication by BANC-FlyWire Consortium on mapping an entire fly central nervous system.
Since its inception in 2002, The Wiley Prize has recognized researchers opening new areas or advancing major concepts within biomedical sciences; several previous winners have gone on to receive Nobel Prizes.
Murthy, Seung,and co-winners will accept their awards at an event scheduled for April 10.
