NPP's PhD student Ella Svahn has been awarded the 2025 Jon Driver Prize

NPP'S Ella Svahn has been awarded the 2025 Jon Driver Prize for her PhD work, that will be presented at the Neuroscience symposium.

Ellas work is investigating how we make decisions in uncertain environments, and how the neuromodulator acetylcholine may be crucial for our ability to use a key strategy we use to deal with these situations called hidden state inference. She investigates this with an exciting combination of mouse behaviour, in vivo optical recordings, pharmacology and computational modelling.

Ellas is a student in the Optical Biology PhD program at UCL.

More about the prize:

Jon Driver (4 July 1962 – 28 November 2011) was a UCL psychologist and neuroscientist. He was a leading figure in the study of perception, selective attention and multisensory integration in the normal and damaged human brain.

Reflecting Jon Driver’s commitment to mentorship, and his seminal contribution to promoting neuroscience at UCL, the prize is awarded competitively every year to recognise the high-quality research of students completing their PhD in the field of neuroscience at UCL.  Cash £750 awarded to the winner(s).  The winner(s) will be asked to give a short presentation of the work that the award was given for at the annual UCL Neuroscience Symposium on Wednesday 18th June 2025.