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Howard B. Eichenbaum, a William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Boston University, and an internationally recognized figure in advancing our understanding of the fundamental nature and brain mechanisms of memory, died in Boston, Massachusetts on July 21, 2017 following recent spine surgery at age 69.Eichenbaum's contributions to the field of memory research were profound, in helping us to better understand how memory works and how it is organized in the brain. His empirical and theoretical work showed a career‐long commitment to synthesizing results across species, across methods, and across levels of analysis to advance the notion of there being multiple memory systems of the brain and to illuminate some of their basic neural mechanisms. He did a brilliant job of using rodent models, combining lesion‐based studies of memory loss in animals with damage to the hippocampus and related areas, together with electrophysiological studies of the activity of single neurons and neuronal ensembles while animals performed memory tasks. He used this combined approach to illuminate the functional circuits that support critical aspects of declarative (or relational) memory and to characterize memory representations in the brain, showing different levels of relational representation supported by the hippocampus: relations between items and the context in which they were experienced within a given event, relations between events in sequence that occur within a larger episode, and relations between episodes that form the larger network of an individual's declarative memory. Most exciting, perhaps, was his recent discovery and characterization of “time cells” in hippocampus, findings demonstrating that the hippocampus can represent events within their temporal context, just as the hippocampus represents events within their spatial context, together providing critical mechanisms for the organization of experience in memory. Even while working to understand these systems mechanistically, he never saw that work as an end in itself, but rather as a means to more fully understand human memory. Consequently, he played a critical role over the years in relating and reconciling the animal and human memory literatures.Eichenbaum's major contributions to the field were not limited to his scientific writings, but rather came additionally from his creative long‐term editorship of the journal Hippocampus, even while serving on the editorial boards of more than 10 other journals; his mentorship, guidance, and encouragement of scores of undergraduates, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and junior faculty who went on to have their own significant impact on the field; and his remarkable history of service and leadership to the field.Eichenbaum joined the Boston University faculty in 1996 after having obtained a BS in cell biology and a PhD in psychology at the University of Michigan and completing postdoctoral training at MIT, then holding faculty positions at Wellesley College (1977–1991), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1991–1993), and SUNY Stony Brook (1993–1996). At the time of his death, Eichenbaum's other roles at Boston University included serving as founding Director of the Center for Memory and Brain and of the Cognitive Neurobiology Laboratory. He had earlier founded both the Undergraduate Program for Neuroscience and the Graduate Program for Neuroscience.His contributions have been formally recognized with multiple honors, including being named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Association for Psychological Science; appointment to the Council of the Society for Neuroscience and the NIMH National Advisory Mental Health Council; and election to Chair, Section on Neuroscience, American Association for the Advancement of Science.Eichenbaum's non‐science pursuits included coaching his two sons' Little League baseball teams for many years, taking his sons around the country on a “baseball‐parks‐of‐America tour” – a quest to catch a game at every Major League Baseball Park in America that spanned across 15 years, kayaking in the waters off Chatham, MA, and rooting passionately for his Boston Red Sox and University of Michigan teams. He is survived by his beloved wife of 35 years, Karen J. Shedlack, a physician; two sons, Alexander E. Eichenbaum and Adam S. Eichenbaum, who are pursuing graduate studies in clinical psychology and neuroscience, respectively; 100‐year‐old mother, Edith (Kahn) Eichenbaum; brother, Jerold Eichenbaum; and sister, Miriam Eichenbaum Drop. He was pre‐deceased by his father, Victor Eichenbaum, who had emigrated from Czechoslovakia at 14 years of age to make his life in the United States.
Hippocampus – Wiley
Published: Oct 1, 2017
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