Gordon M. Shepherd received his BS at Iowa State College in 1955, MD at Harvard in 1959, and DPhil at Oxford in 1962. After postdoctoral training at NIH, MIT and the Karolinska Institute he joined the faculty at Yale Medical School, where he is Professor of Neuroscience. Sten Grillner studied at the medical faculty in Gothenburg, Sweden, and received his MD, PhD in neurophysiology in 1969. He has been a Professor and Director of the Nobel Institute for Neurophysiology at the Karolinska Institute since 1987.