Catherine Dulac Wins 2026 Pearl Meister Greengard Prize for Mapping the Brain Circuits of Instinct

Catherine Dulac, the molecular biologist and neuroscientist whose work has reshaped how science understands the biological roots of social behavior, has been named the 2026 recipient of the Pearl Meister Greengard Prize. Awarded annually by Rockefeller University, the prize is widely regarded as the preeminent international award honoring outstanding women scientists. Dulac, the Xander University Professor at Harvard University and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, will receive the honor at a ceremony on the Rockefeller campus on October 20, where she will be presented with the award by Paula Zahn, the ten-time Emmy Award-winning journalist and television anchor whose broadcasting career has spanned more than three decades at ABC News, CBS News, Fox News, and CNN.

The prize carries particular historical weight. It was established by the late Paul Greengard, the Vincent Astor Professor at Rockefeller University, together with his wife, the sculptor Ursula von Rydingsvard. Greengard, who shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discoveries about how nerve cells communicate, donated his monetary share of the Nobel award to Rockefeller and, with the support of philanthropic partners, created an annual prize dedicated to recognizing women scientists whose achievements might otherwise go underrecognized. The award is named for Greengard’s mother, Pearl Meister Greengard, who died giving birth to him, and it includes a $100,000 honorarium.

Dulac’s selection reflects a career devoted to one of the most fundamental questions in neuroscience: how the brain generates instinctive behaviors that animals perform correctly the first time they attempt them, without any prior training or instruction. Mating, parenting, aggression, and the drive to seek or avoid the company of others are not learned skills. They emerge from neural circuitry assembled by genetic programs over millions of years of evolution, and Dulac has spent her career tracing those circuits from molecule to behavior with a precision few have matched.

Her pioneering contributions began with the vomeronasal organ, a specialized sensory structure found in many mammals that detects pheromones, the chemical signals exchanged between animals of the same species. At a time when the molecular identity of pheromone detection remained obscure, Dulac uncovered the genes that encode the receptor proteins expressed in the vomeronasal organ, opening the door to a molecular understanding of how chemical social signals enter the nervous system. This achievement transformed the study of chemical communication in mammals, turning a field that had relied largely on behavioral observation into one that could be interrogated with the tools of modern molecular biology.

Building on that foundation, Dulac used the vomeronasal organ as a window onto the neural control of mating behavior in mice. Her experiments overturned a long-standing assumption about how the brain is organized by sex. Many scientists had believed that the brain comes pre-wired as either male or female, with hardwired circuits producing the distinct behaviors typical of each sex. Dulac’s work demonstrated something far more surprising: the nervous system of both sexes contains the circuitry for a broad repertoire of sex-specific behaviors, and the expression of those behaviors depends on how sensory inputs and hormonal states switch particular circuits on or off. The implications reached well beyond reproductive biology, suggesting that behavioral differences between the sexes reflect the regulation of shared neural substrates rather than the presence or absence of entirely separate wiring.

Dulac then turned to one of the most emotionally resonant of all behaviors: parenting. Her laboratory identified a regulatory hub in the hypothalamus, a deep brain region long associated with survival functions such as feeding, temperature regulation, and hormone control. Within the hypothalamus’s medial preoptic area, she found that neurons producing the neuropeptide galanin form a hub that is both necessary and sufficient for parenting behavior in males and females alike. In experimental terms, this meant that activating these neurons could elicit parental responses, while silencing them abolished the drive to care for young. The discovery provided one of the clearest examples in neuroscience of a defined neural population controlling a complex social behavior.

Her investigations of the parenting circuit did not stop there. Dulac went on to uncover separate pools of neurons that control different components of maternal and paternal care, such as the motivation to groom pups and the suppression of aggression toward infants. This decomposition of a single behavior into distinct neural modules revealed how the brain coordinates multiple competing drives. An animal that is simultaneously capable of attacking intruders and nurturing its offspring must possess circuitry that inhibits one program while permitting the other, and Dulac’s findings illuminated how that balance is achieved at the level of identifiable neurons.

The reach of her laboratory’s work extends beyond social behavior in the narrow sense. Dulac’s group has identified clusters of neurons in the hypothalamus that drive classic sickness behaviors, including the seeking of warmth and the loss of appetite that accompany infection. These findings connect the neuroscience of social behavior to the biology of the immune system, showing that the brain coordinates the body-wide response to illness through dedicated neural populations. Her lab has also discovered two opposing neuron populations linked to loneliness-like states in animals: one that fires during isolation to signal the need for company, and another that becomes active after socializing to signal that the need has been met. Together, these populations resemble a biological homeostat for social contact, much like the circuits that regulate hunger or thirst.

Currently, Dulac is probing a question with striking implications: why bacterial and parasitic infections trigger opposite social responses in animals, with some infections producing avoidance of others and others producing hypersociality. Her laboratory is searching for the neural mechanisms that distinguish these responses, work that could deepen understanding of how the brain integrates information about health, infection, and social environment. The research sits at the frontier of an emerging view of the hypothalamus as a sophisticated control center that continuously weighs internal physiological states against external social signals.

Dulac’s achievements have earned her recognition at the highest levels of science. She is an officer of the Legion d’Honneur, France’s highest civilian honor, and a member of both the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the French Academy of Sciences. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Paris and completed her postdoctoral training at Columbia University before joining the faculty at Harvard, where she has built one of the most influential laboratories in the study of social behavior. Michael W. Young, the Richard and Jeanne Fisher Professor at Rockefeller and chair of the selection committee, noted that Catherine has made spectacular contributions to the understanding of mammalian pheromones and their roles in sex-specific behaviors, and that she has also made striking discoveries about how the brain generates complex parenting behaviors. As the 2026 Pearl Meister Greengard Prize ceremony approaches, the award stands as both a celebration of a singular scientific career and a reminder of the prize’s founding purpose: to honor women scientists whose work changes what humanity knows about the natural world. The October 20 event is open to the public, with registration encouraged for attendees who wish to witness the recognition of a scientist whose discoveries continue to illuminate the hidden architecture of instinct.

Subject of Research: Neural circuits underlying instinctive social behaviors such as mating, parenting, and aggression

Article Title: Molecular biologist and neuroscientist Catherine Dulac wins the 2026 Pearl Meister Greengard Prize

Article References: Molecular biologist and neuroscientist Catherine Dulac wins the 2026 Pearl Meister Greengard Prize. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

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Keywords: Catherine Dulac, Pearl Meister Greengard Prize, Rockefeller University, neuroscience, pheromones, vomeronasal organ, hypothalamus, parenting behavior, social behavior, galanin, Harvard University, women in science