Two Princeton professors will receive awards from the National Academy of Sciences for their achievements in physical, biological, social, and medical sciences. The academy will honor 19 scientists at an awards ceremony on April 26 in Washington, D.C.
Molly Crockett, professor of psychology and the University Center for Human Values, will receive the Troland Award for their “pioneering contributions to a mechanistic theory of moral cognition” and will receive $75,000. The other recipient of the Troland Award is Jason Yeatman, a psychology professor at Stanford University.
In addition, neuroscience professor Sebastian Seung will receive the Pradel Research Award for “transformative advances in computational neuroscience,” as well as $50,000.
Both Princeton professors plan to use their prize money to fund their research and labs. Yet, despite their achievements, they expressed mixed feelings about the award.
“The whole concept of awards to individual researchers doesn’t reflect the fact that scientific work — and I think all knowledge work — really comes out of community,” Crockett said in an interview with The Daily Princetonian. “I see the award as recognizing all of my collaborators, as well as my own efforts.”
Seung echoed this sentiment in an interview with the ‘Prince.’ “It can be a little embarrassing to receive a prize when it’s obviously the whole field ... I think I’d be recognized for, first and foremost, the work of my former students and postdoctoral researchers, all the staff, and all the members of my lab, as a recognition of a team effort.”
For Seung, the honor comes with a complicated history. He works on connectomics, which maps neuron connections of the brain. When the field first emerged, however, many researchers faced skepticism about the viability of their research.
“When I started working in this field 20 years ago, it was very controversial. Many people thought it was not a worthwhile thing to study,” Seung said. “It’s a little surprising to get an award because that means that the field has become mainstream during that time. We were renegades back then, but we’re just regular people now.”
Crockett’s own journey in their field has also gone through many changes. The first few stages of their career were also in neuroscience, where they studied how the brain produces moral judgments and decisions using mathematical models. Now, however, they’ve turned to fields outside of pure science, like anthropology, to study how technologies like social media and artificial intelligence affect humanity’s moral and social lives.
“The longer I worked with methods in neuroscience and computational modeling, the less satisfied I felt with those approaches’ ability to fully characterize the richness and breadth of human social life,” Crockett said.
They continued: “There’s a risk … that we who study humans might lose track of ways of knowing that aren’t easily quantified — that resist the computational approaches that are receiving most of the funding and prestige right now.”
One of Seung’s goals is reading memories from connectomics. According to Seung, memories are stored by changing connections in the brain, meaning that, theoretically, researchers should be able to read out a memory from a connectome. He also hopes to use his brain mapping research to help find the brain’s “miswirings” that cause brain disorders.
“If you can understand how brains work, you should be able to understand something about how they break,” Seung said.
He also spoke to the importance of having conviction and confidence in the face of disagreement.
“There are times in life when you have to realize that everybody else is wrong, or most people are wrong, and that’s a big challenge for people,” he said. “And it’s not just scientists — in all areas of life, realizing when the conventional wisdom is wrong is a very important thing if you want to achieve something significant.”
Crockett says they hope to use the recognition they’ve received from the academy to expand the ways researchers approach the study of human social life.
“There’s a risk in thinking that the parts of moral and social life that we can describe by these mathematical approaches are representative of all parts of social and moral life,” Crockett said. “We’re about to enter a really exciting time where we have technologies that can dramatically expand the types of questions that we ask, but … there’s a risk again of mistaking information processing for meaning.”
Crockett acknowledged that societal stereotypes of the power and prestige surrounding certain fields unconsciously shaped their choices: “I was very ambitious, and I wanted to pursue a career path that I saw as being one that had a lot of respect.”
Now, Crockett says, AI is similarly attractive to people who want to solve social problems with science and technology, but a field’s societal standing doesn’t necessarily reflect its value for contributing to collective knowledge.
Crockett also encourages students to make the most out of their education.
“This is such a precious time for building a set of skills, knowing how to think, and … the relationships with other people that will help you build a community of thinkers … that will sustain you through the rest of your life.”
Elizabeth Hu is a staff News writer, assistant head Copy editor, and associate Data editor from Houston. She can be reached at eh9203[at]princeton.edu.
Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.
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