Eric R. Kandel, M.D., is University Professor at Columbia; Kavli Professor and Director, Kavli Institute for Brain Science; Co-Director, Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute; and a Senior Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. A graduate of Harvard College and N.Y.U. School of Medicine,  Dr. Kandel trained in Neurobiology at the NIH and in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.  He joined the faculty of the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University in 1974 as the founding director of the Center for Neurobiology and Behavior.  At Columbia Kandel organized the neuroscience curriculum.  He is an editor of Principles of Neural Science, the standard textbook in the field now in its 5th edition.  In 2006, Kandel wrote a book on the brain for the general public entitled In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind, which won both the L.A. Times and U.S. National Academy of Science Awards for best book in Science and Technology in 2008.  A documentary film based on that book is also entitled In Search of Memory.  In 2012 Kandel wrote The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present, which won the Bruno-Kreisky Award in Literature, Austria's highest literary award.

Eric Kandel’s research has been concerned with the molecular mechanisms of memory storage in Aplysia and mice.  More recently, he has studied animal models in mice of memory disorders, mental illness and nicotine addiction.  Kandel has received twenty-two honorary degrees, is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences as well as being a Foreign Member of the Royal Society of London and a member of the National Science Academies of Austria, France, Germany and Greece.  He has been recognized with the Albert Lasker Award, the Heineken Award of the Netherlands, the Gairdner Award of Canada, the Harvey Prize and the Wolf Prize of Israel, the National Medal of Science USA and the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 2000.