Eric R. Kandel shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in physiology/medicine for his elegant demonstration of the brain's plasticity in response to environmental changes. His research has been concerned with the molecular mechanisms of memory in Aplysia, a marine snail, and mice, in which he recently has focused on the genetic "switch" for converting short-term to long-term memory and on how long-term memory can be restricted to be synapse-specific. He has identified compounds produced and secreted by neurons that trigger activity in other neurons and examined the factors that make neural connections "plastic," or changeable with experience.

Kandel was born in 1929 in Vienna, Austria. He graduated from Harvard University (1952) with majors in history and literature but went on to receive a medical degree from New York University School of Medicine (1956) and trained in neurobiology at the National Institute of Mental Health (1975-1960) and in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School (1961-1962). After teaching in the departments of physiology and psychiatry at NYU for nine years, he joined the faculty of the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University in 1974 as the founding director of the Center for Neurobiology and Behavior. He was named University Professor at Columbia in 1983 and has also been a senior investigator at Columbia's Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 1984.

Kandel is the author of nine books, including Memory:From Mind to Molecules (1999). He returns to Gustavus after appearing at the 1994 Nobel Conference, "Unlocking the Brain."