Kandel, Eric Richard

Kandel, Eric Richard (1929–  ) neurobiologist, educator; born in Vienna. He emigrated to the United States in 1939. He became a professor at Columbia University in 1983 and senior investigator at Columbia's Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 1984. During the 1970s and 1980s he worked on cellular and molecular mechanisms of three basic forms of learning, habituation, sensitization, and classical conditioning; his findings suggest that learning produces changes in behavior by modulating the strength of neural connections.