Prof. Nachum Ulanovsky

Department of Neurobiology

Prof. Nachum Ulanovsky was a baby when his family made aliyah from Moscow. He grew up in Israel, received his BSc magna cum laude in physics at Tel Aviv University (1992), served for five years in the IDF, and, in parallel, continued his graduate studies in biology at the Weizmann Institute of Science and at Tel Aviv University. In 2004, he earned his PhD in neuroscience and neural computation summa cum laude at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. From 2004-2007, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Psychology and Institute for Systems Research at the University of Maryland, College Park. He joined the Weizmann Institute in 2007.

Prof. Ulanovsky is interested in the brain basis of behavior and the neurobiology of learning and memory. His main area of study is how three-dimensional, complex naturalistic spaces are represented and remembered in the mammalian brain.  To this end, he uses bats as animal models (particularly Egyptian fruit bats), fitting them with devices which allow him to measure the activity of individual neurons in their brains as they fly. He also fits fruit bats with the smallest tracking devices in the world to track their flight. Prof. Ulanovsky’s group was able to conduct the first ever neural recordings in flying animals, which allowed them to describe the coding of 3D maps and 3D compasses in the brain, as well as to clarify the brain basis of how bats navigate to goals. They recently recorded from the brains of two bats during social interactions, and found neurons in the bat brain that represent the position of another individual—which may underlie social-spatial cognition. The findings of the Ulanovsky group have been published in the world’s top journals such as Nature and Science.

Prof. Ulanovsky is the receipient of the Helen and Martin Kimmel Award for Innovative Investigation (2018), the André Deloro Prize for Scientific Research (2017), and was the first Israeli and second non-American in history to receive the prestigious SfN Young Investigator Award from the Society for Neuroscience (2015). Among his other honors and awards are the prestigious Bernard Katz Prize in Neuroscience awarded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2013), the Krill Prize for the advancement of science from the Wolf Foundation (2012), and the Sieratzki Prize for Advances in Neuroscience (2011).

Prof. Ulanovsky is married and has three children. His hobbies include reading, sports, and outdoor activities, especially hiking and rappelling.