Nick Turk-Browne, director of Yale’s Wu Tsai Institute, has won the National Academy of Sciences’ Troland Research Award for his contributions to experimental psychology. The award, given to researchers under the age of 45, recognizes “unusual achievement” and honors just two individuals each year.
Turk-Browne, a professor in the Department of Psychology in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, didn’t know he was nominated, but discerned something was afoot when he was notified of an unexpected package delivered to his office. Thankfully, an email followed shortly thereafter sharing the news of his win.
“It’s a very gratifying recognition of the work of my students and postdocs and the impact of our work on the field,” said Turk-Browne. “It’s really an award for the lab and we will celebrate it together.”

Turk-Browne monitoring an experiment with former graduate student Tristan Yates.
Turk-Browne began his research career as a student studying perception and attention, but that work quickly revealed that those abilities had a deep connection with memory.
“I got really interested in the idea that memory infuses everything we do — how we decide, how we communicate, how we see, how we pay attention,” said Turk-Browne.
That insight would lead to his own lab’s focus on human learning and memory. The brain adapts and learns constantly, all throughout life. And that ability is the essential core of human nature, says Turk-Browne. Memories are the basis of so much of what makes us human, from how we play sports and perform our jobs to our personalities and relationships with others.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging is one of the tools Turk-Browne employs in his research into human learning and memory.
Turk-Browne studies this defining characteristic of the human brain by measuring what people learn or remember and how this information is processed and stored in their brains. Current projects employ functional magnetic resonance imaging, recordings from deep-brain devices used to treat individuals with epilepsy, brain-computer interfaces, and computational models.
He has also begun to investigate how learning develops.
“How is it that babies are able to learn so much so rapidly? And why are some things like language easy to pick up when we’re young but a struggle to learn as adults?” said Turk-Browne. “On the other side of it, why is it that we don’t remember anything from our first few years of life? These are some of the questions we’re asking.”
Just two other Yale faculty members have won the Troland Research Award. Karen Wynn, a professor emeritus in the Department of Psychology, won the award in 2001. Marvin Chun, the Richard M. Colgate Professor of Psychology, won in 2006.
“I’m thrilled to see Nick recognized with this prestigious honor,” said Chun. “He inspires everyone with his innovative research program, his rigorous training and care of students, and his pioneering leadership of Yale’s world-class Wu Tsai Institute.”
Each Troland Research Award winner will receive $75,000 in research funding. Turk-Browne says he’ll use the award to support new ideas from within his lab that push boundaries, which otherwise can be difficult to fund through traditional grants.
And while right now he’s focused on understanding learning and memory in the laboratory, he’s eager to eventually apply findings to education and classroom-based learning in the future.
An award like this, Turk-Browne said, causes him to reflect on current work, future impacts, and the long path in-between.
“Science can be extremely slow and difficult and as I’ve gotten older, I’ve been drawn to more challenging problems,” he said. “Tackling big, hard problems is a long process with a lot of failure. This award, given by the most eminent scientists in our field, is a marker that we are doing research that other people value. And it will encourage us forward.”