A Fireside Chat with May-Britt Moser

As a girl growing up on a remote island farm in western Norway, May-Britt Moser looked at the people and animals around her and wondered what was happening inside them, or in her words, “how the brain is generating behavior, memory, our cognition, our emotions”. Over four decades as a psychologist and neurologist, Dr. Moser has met with astonishing success in answering these questions, leading her team to remarkable discoveries of the neural mechanisms by which we mark time, form memories, and find our way around. In 2014 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for discovering the network of so-called grid cells that encode spatial information and enable navigation in humans and other mammals. We talked with Dr. Moser about her research and career; her reflections on science, tenacity, and gender; her analysis of how good science gets done; and (of course) the day she won the Nobel.