Ann Graybiel

In 2018, Graybiel won the Gruber Prize in Neuroscience along with Okihide Hikosaka and Wolfram Schultz.

In 2001, Graybiel was awarded the President's National Medal of Science for "her pioneering contributions to the understanding of the anatomy and physiology of the brain, including the structure, chemistry, and function of the pathways subserving thought and movement." In 2012, she was awarded the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience, along with Cornelia Bargmann and Winfried Denk, "for elucidating basic neuronal mechanisms underlying perception and decision."

In 1994, she was named the Walter A. Rosenblith Professor Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Science and was named an Investigator at the MIT McGovern Institute for Brain research in 2001. She was named Institute Professor in 2008.

For much of her career, Graybiel has focused on the physiology of the striatum, a basal ganglia structure implicated in the control of movement, cognition, habit formation, and decision-making. In the late 1970s, Graybiel discovered that while striatal neurons appeared to be an amorphous mass, they were in fact organized into chemical compartments, which she termed striosomes. Later research revealed links between striosomal abnormalities and neurological disorders, such as mood dysfunction in Huntington's disease and depletion of dopamine in Parkinson's disease.

Graybiel majored in biology and chemistry at Harvard University, receiving her bachelor's degree in 1964. After receiving an MA in biology from Tufts University in 1966, she began doctoral study in psychology and brain science at MIT under the direction of Hans-Lukas Teuber and Walle Nauta. She received her PhD in 1971 and joined the MIT faculty in 1973.

Ann Martin Graybiel (born 1942) is an Institute Professor and a faculty member in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is also an investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. She is an expert on the basal ganglia and the neurophysiology of habit formation, implicit learning, and her work is relevant to Parkinson's disease, Huntington's disease, obsessive–compulsive disorder, substance abuse and other disorders that affect the basal ganglia.