Wolfson JRF Awarded Prestigious Travel Fellowship
Congratulations to Dr Fei-Yang Huang, Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College and Wellcome Trust Early Career Fellow in the Department of Experimental Psychology, who has been awarded the prestigious IBRO/SfN International Travel Fellowship. Dr Huang will present his research, “Structured Nutrient Encoding in the Primate Amygdala During Reward-Based Decisions,” at the 2025 Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting in San Diego, USA.
He is one of only twelve international fellows and the sole UK recipient selected from across all neuroscience disciplines for this honour. His work will be showcased in the Early Career Poster Session on 15 November and formally recognised by the SfN President during the Presidential Lecture on 16 November.
Dr Huang’s research focuses on the amygdala, a key brain region involved in emotion, motivation, and reward processing. While the amygdala is best known for processing the emotional significance of experiences, this work shows that it also carries a detailed representation of nutrients, such as fat and sugar, found in food. By analysing the activity of individual brain cells, the study revealed that the amygdala organises information into structured neural patterns, with distinct neuron clusters tuned to specific nutritional or sensory features.
These nutrient-specific patterns provide a neural framework for how the brain transforms the physical properties of food into subjective value signals that guide food choices. Overall, the findings suggest that the brain’s reward system is organised around fundamental nutritional dimensions, linking nutrition and decision-making, and offering new insight into the neural basis of healthy and maladaptive eating behaviours.
