Sten Grillner

Professor Sten Grillner is a Distinguished Professor of Neurophysiology and Behavior at Karolinska Institutet. He has been a Professor and Director at Karolinska Institutet since 1987. He is a member of the Academia Europaeae, Royal Swedish Academy of Science, National Academy of Science, Institute of Medicine. He has received honors such as the Bristol-Myers Squibb Award, Reeve-Irvine Award, SFN Ralph Gerard Prize, and Kavil Prize. He has made fundamental discoveries in the neurophysiology of the motor function of the spinal cord and has elucidated the locomotion-related spinal circuitry of the lamprey with respect to connectivity, neurophysiology, biophysics, pharmacology, and neural modeling. His main aim is to unravel the cellular bases of motor behavior with a focus on the mechanisms underlying selection of behavior and the neural bases of in particular goal-directed locomotion and related steering, orienting and eye movements. The role of the basal ganglia, habenulae and tectum are in focus, while we have previously elucidated the brainstem–spinal cord microcircuits underlying locomotion. This in turn requires a detailed knowledge of which nerve cells take part, how they talk to each other through synaptic interaction and an understanding of the intrinsic function of these networks.