The European Commission on Sunday (November 7) announced the winners of the second annual Marie Curie Excellence Awards, which recognize quality research conducted by researchers from Italy, Germany, Israel, and The Netherlands with €50,000 prize money each.
The awards, inaugurated last year, are part of the European Union's efforts to stop its best scientists from fleeing to greener pastures in the United States and elsewhere. They are open to scientists of any nationality who have received EU training and mobility support for at least a year.
The winners this year included Christian Marc Keysers, from Germany, who was recognized for his studies, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, investigating how people empathize with each other. Keysers now works at the BCN Neuro-Imaging Centre at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen in the Netherlands.
"My main motivation in my research is to understand how our brains work," Keysers said in a statement. "This...