On April 13, Solomon H. Snyder, M.D., was awarded the Salk Institute’s Medal for Research Excellence together with cancer biologist Robert Weinberg, from MIT’s Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. The award has only been given twice before in the Salk Institute’s 55-year history. 

 

“Sol Snyder’s seminal contributions to the field of neuroscience continue to fuel research today,” says Elizabeth Blackburn, president of the Salk Institute.

 

“Sol is an innovator and a legend in the field of neuroscience,” says Richard Huganir, Ph.D., director of the Solomon H. Snyder Department of Neuroscience. “He founded the Department of Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins in 1980, one of the first neuroscience departments in the world.”

 

Snyder, a professor of neuroscience in the Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, was recognized for groundbreaking discoveries ranging from the discovery of opiate receptors in the brain to proving that gases, such as nitric oxide, can serve as messengers between neurons. Many advances in molecular neuroscience have stemmed from Snyder's identification of receptors that neurons have for messenger molecules and some medications, a find that led to clarification of how these drugs work in the brain.