The McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience — an independent charitable organization established by the Minneapolis-based McKnight Foundation — has announced the four winners of its 2014 Memory and Cognitive Disorders Awards.

Four teams of scientists will receive three-year, $300,000 grants to pursue innovative research that explores new approaches to the diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of memory and cognitive disorders. Established in 1986, the awards are designed to encourage collaboration between basic and clinical neuroscientists, with the goal of translating laboratory discoveries into diagnoses and therapies for brain disorders.

This year's winners include Dr. Nicole Calakos and Dr. Henry Yin of Duke University, who are examining the relationship between habit and compulsivity; Dr. Edward Chang of the University of California at San Francisco, who is researching how humans learn words and verbal memory; Dr. Adam Kepecs of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, who is studying cell-type specific broadcast signals from the nucleus basalis; and Dr. John Wixted and Dr. Larry Squire of the University of California at San Diego, who are examining the representation of episodic and semantic memory in single neurons in the human hippocampus.

"These research projects share a long-term goal: to develop the deep, fundamental knowledge of the brain that is required to design new therapies for human diseases of memory and cognition," said Memory and Cognitive Disorders Awards committee chair Eric Nestler. "In undertaking different aspects of this complex work, each of this year's research projects will contribute an important piece of the puzzle."