The University of Chicago established a named lecture in honour of Ray Guillery’s contributions to neuroscience. Dr Guillery, who was Dr Lee’s Professor of Anatomy at the University of Oxford, contributed seminal ideas about visual processing and thalamocortical relationships. Dr Guillery also has a special connection to the University of Chicago: he took the helm of the neuroscience program in the 1970s and continued to publish with their current Chair of Neurobiology, Murray Sherman.
Professor Sarah London from the Grossman Institute for Neuroscience, Quantitative Biology and Human Behavior, University of Chicago wrote: “We have selected Professor Zoltán Molnár as our choice for the 2019 Guillery lecturer because his work continues the mission of dissecting how neural circuits are organized, with special attention to connections between cortex and thalamus. Professor Molnár’s multi-scale approach embraces the complexity of nervous system organization and incorporates the influence of the external world, enabling discoveries of coordinated biological processes across time and space that ultimately emerge as brain function. Professor Molnár integrated work excellently demonstrates how deep knowledge of neural plasticity requires consideration of genes, cells, and circuits.”
Professor Molnár’s research has many connections to the research conducted by the Grossman Institute of Neuroscience, including genetics driving nervous system development, cell and systems levels investigations into behaviour, and the interplay between mechanisms of maturation and experience in determining patterns neural function.
For more information on Dr Ray Guillery, you can visit the European Journal of Neuroscience special issue (edited by J. Paul Bolam and John J. Foxe) “in memory of Ray Guillery, colleague, mentor, friend, and the founding Editor of EJN, who died in the spring of 2017”.
This issue also contains a personal account written by Prof Molnár on Dr Guillery (Molnár Z. (2019) Eur J Neurosci. 49(7):957-963).
In July 2018, Prof Molnár delivered a talk outlining the life and work of Rainer Walter Guillery at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History as part of the 2018 DPAG Away Day. The full lecture can be viewed here.