The award places particular emphasis on the central thread running through Acemoglu’s career: the analysis of how political institutions condition economic institutions and, through them, the long-term prosperity of nations. This framework, developed over more than three decades of research, has become a point of reference for economists and political scientists seeking to explain why some countries grow rich while others remain trapped in poverty. Rather than treating geography, culture, or natural resources as the decisive factors, Acemoglu’s work argues that the rules governing political and economic life, who holds power, how that power is constrained, and whether opportunities are broadly shared, are fundamental determinants of national success and failure.

The jury’s citation connected this scholarship directly to the present moment. At a time when fundamental democratic principles, including the rule of law, the protection of fundamental rights, and respect for pluralism, face new challenges in different parts of the world, the jury stated, his work provides important theoretical insights and valuable analytical elements for informed public debate and the design of public policies. The statement underscores a distinctive feature of Acemoglu’s research: its explicit engagement with questions of institutional design and democratic resilience, areas that sit at the intersection of technical economics and urgent contemporary politics.

Acemoglu’s path to prominence began with an academic formation spanning two countries. He graduated from the University of York in the United Kingdom in 1989 and completed his doctorate at the London School of Economics in 1992, remaining at the institution for a year as a teacher. In 1993, at a remarkably young age for such an appointment, he joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has built his career ever since. From that base he has produced a body of work whose scale is unusual even by the standards of elite economics departments.

That output includes more than a hundred articles published in the discipline’s leading international journals, among them the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and the Review of Economic Studies, as well as four books. His standing within the profession is reflected in his membership of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the European Economic Association, and the Econometric Society, and in his service as editor of Econometrica, widely regarded as one of the most rigorous and selective journals in economic theory. Few economists have combined such editorial and institutional responsibilities with a comparable record of published research.

Among his most impactful works is Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, written with James A. Robinson, a book that brought their institutional argument to a global readership far beyond academic economics. At its core lies the concept of inclusive institutions: those that encourage investment and innovation and provide a level playing field for participants in economic life. The book contrasts these with arrangements that concentrate power and opportunity in the hands of narrow elites, an imbalance that, in the authors’ account, suppresses the creative destruction and broad participation on which sustained prosperity depends. The distinction between inclusive and extractive institutions has since become a standard analytical vocabulary in development economics and comparative politics.

A second fundamental axis of Acemoglu’s research concerns technological progress and its economic and social consequences. His work has examined how innovation transforms economies and, critically, how its benefits and costs are distributed across different groups in society. This line of inquiry has become increasingly prominent as automation, artificial intelligence, and digital platforms reshape labor markets in wealthy and developing countries alike. By treating technology not as an exogenous force but as a set of choices shaped by institutions, incentives, and power, Acemoglu’s research asks who decides which technologies are developed and whose interests those decisions serve, questions that have moved to the center of public policy debates on the future of work.

The honors accumulated across his career trace the trajectory of a scholar whose influence was recognized long before the field’s highest award arrived. He received the John Bates Clark Medal from the American Economic Association in 2005, an honor traditionally reserved for economists under the age of forty who have made significant contributions to the discipline, and the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in 2016. The culminating recognition came in 2024, when he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences together with Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson for their studies of how institutions are formed and how they affect prosperity, a prize that confirmed the centrality of the institutional research program the three scholars built over decades of collaboration.

The medal Acemoglu will receive in December carries its own distinguished history. The CSIC Extraordinary Medal for Scientific Merit, formerly known as the CSIC Gold Medal, has recognized since its creation in 1989 individuals and entities that have made exceptional contributions to the advancement of science and technology. Its roster of past recipients reads as a cross-section of modern science: the British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, honored in the medal’s inaugural year of 1989; the American Nobel laureate physicist Roy J. Glauber in 2008; the Colombian neuroscientist Rodolfo Llinás in 2012; the astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell, whose discovery of pulsars transformed astronomy, in 2015; the Nobel laureate in Physics Donna Strickland in 2023; and the Spanish biophysicist Eva Nogales, recognized in 2024 for her pioneering work in visualizing macromolecular function using cryo-electron microscopy.

Acemoglu’s addition to that list is notable for a simple reason: he is an economist joining an honor roll dominated by natural scientists, a reflection of the CSIC’s judgment that his contributions to understanding institutions, democracy, and development rank among the exceptional advances in knowledge of recent decades. As democracies worldwide confront pressures on their institutions and as technological change accelerates faster than the frameworks governing it, the jury’s rationale reads as both a tribute to a career and a statement about the questions that matter now. The December ceremony will formally mark what the citation makes clear: a body of work that has given scholars, policymakers, and citizens a shared language for discussing why nations succeed, why they fail, and how the rules societies write for themselves shape the prosperity and freedom their people enjoy.

Subject of Research: Award of the CSIC Extraordinary Medal for Scientific Merit to economist Daron Acemoglu for his research on institutions and economic development

Article Title: CSIC awards its Extraordinary Medal for Scientific Merit to economist Daron Acemoglu

Article References: CSIC awards its Extraordinary Medal for Scientific Merit to economist Daron Acemoglu. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Daron Acemoglu, CSIC, Extraordinary Medal for Scientific Merit, institutions, economic development, political economy, democracy, technological progress, Nobel Memorial Prize, Why Nations Fail, MIT, Spain

The study, published in PLOS Biology, was led by Santiago Canals, head of the Plasticity of Brain Networks laboratory, together with Encarni Marcos, who heads the Neural Mechanisms of Behaviour research line at the same institute. Their findings show that the level of inhibitory tone in the dentate gyrus, a gateway structure within the hippocampus, determines whether the memory system prioritises sensitivity to small differences between experiences or consistency in the face of change. Crucially, the researchers discovered that this is not a fixed setting but a dynamic dial, one whose optimal position depends on how much information the brain is being asked to remember.

Memory, as Canals emphasises, is not a static repository of information but a living and adaptive process. For memory to be useful, the brain cannot simply store a perfect copy of every experience. If every minor variation in the environment generated an entirely new memory trace, we would be unable to recognise our own homes after the slightest rearrangement of furniture. At the same time, the system must remain sensitive enough to distinguish between two experiences when the differences genuinely matter, such as recognising that a familiar route has been blocked or that a normally friendly face is showing signs of anger. The dentate gyrus, the researchers argue, is one of the key places where this compromise is negotiated.

The dentate gyrus occupies a special position in hippocampal circuitry. It receives most of the information flowing into the hippocampus from the surrounding cortex and performs a transformation that neuroscientists call pattern separation, the process by which similar inputs are made more distinct from one another before they are passed deeper into the memory system. Inhibitory interneurons, the cells that suppress the activity of their neighbours, are central to this computation. By experimentally modifying the activity of these inhibitory cells in mice during memory encoding, the window of time in which information is processed to form a new memory, the team was able to shift the balance between sensitivity and consistency in a controlled way.

The behavioural assays the researchers used exploited a natural preference of mice for novelty. When a mouse encounters something it has not seen before, it spends more time exploring it. By presenting animals with objects whose positions had been shifted by varying amounts, the team could infer from exploratory behaviour whether the animals remembered the original arrangement and how finely they could discriminate changes to it. The results were striking. When inhibition was reduced below normal levels, mice became exquisitely sensitive to change: they detected displacements of objects so small that control animals ignored them entirely. Their behaviour, as Marcos describes it, was more consistent with better memory retrieval and more detailed recall. Conversely, when inhibitory activity was increased, the animals became less sensitive to small differences, and their memory representations proved more resistant to change.

At first glance, these results might suggest that lowering inhibition is simply beneficial, producing sharper, more detailed memories. But the team suspected the story was more complicated, and to test that suspicion they turned to computational modelling. The model offers a simplified mathematical representation of how memory representations are formed and retrieved, allowing the researchers to systematically vary the level of inhibition and observe the consequences for two competing performance measures: the ability to distinguish between similar experiences, and the ability to maintain consistent representations across changing conditions. The simulations revealed a fundamental constraint. Lower inhibition improves discrimination, but it also makes the stored representations increasingly vulnerable to interference, the corruption of one memory by another, and this vulnerability grows as the number of items to be remembered increases.

The model generated a specific and testable prediction: there is no single optimal level of inhibition that works in all situations. When memory load is low, reduced inhibitory activity can favour fine discrimination between similar experiences. But as the amount of information to be remembered grows, higher inhibitory activity becomes advantageous because it helps maintain representations that are sufficiently consistent to avoid confusion between memories. In other words, the ideal operating point of the dentate gyrus shifts depending on the cognitive demands of the moment, a prediction that departs from the simpler view of inhibition as a fixed filter.

To test this prediction in living animals, the researchers designed a more demanding task in which mice had to learn associations between objects, locations and different environments, thereby increasing the memory load relative to the simpler object-placement assays. The behavioural results matched the model’s forecasts. Under conditions of higher memory load, the advantages of reduced inhibition diminished and reversed, exactly as the computational framework predicted. This convergence between simulation and experiment is one of the study’s most significant achievements. By combining experimental and computational tools, as Canals explains, the team identified a balance point in memory formation that helps explain when this inherently flexible system updates with new information and when it instead preserves greater consistency.

An important detail of the findings concerns timing. The effects of manipulating inhibition were observed specifically during encoding, the phase in which the initial representation of an experience is constructed. The mechanism identified therefore shapes how memories are built in the first place, rather than how they are later stabilised through consolidation or retrieved from storage. This distinction matters for how neuroscientists think about the dentate gyrus: rather than being a passive relay, it appears to actively set the operating characteristics of new memories at the moment of their creation, determining in advance whether a given representation will lean toward fine-grained discrimination or robust stability.

Taken together, the results suggest that inhibitory circuits in the dentate gyrus place the hippocampus in different functional states. In a high-sensitivity state, the system readily incorporates changes and discriminates between similar experiences, at the cost of greater vulnerability to interference. In a high-consistency state, representations are protected from interference but small differences may go unnoticed. Marcos interprets the findings as evidence for a mechanism that dynamically adjusts the mode of operation by using inhibition, effectively retuning the memory system as task demands change. The researchers are careful to note, however, that the study has not yet identified which signals control this adjustment under natural conditions. Determining which regulatory mechanisms modulate inhibitory activity, and when in the course of natural behaviour the brain shifts between these states, will be the subject of future research. The work was funded by the Spanish State Research Agency, the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, the Severo Ochoa Programme for Centres of Excellence, the European Union’s Next Generation funds, and the Generalitat Valenciana. Beyond its immediate implications for basic neuroscience, the findings may eventually inform our understanding of disorders in which this balance goes awry, from conditions of excessive memory generalisation to those marked by disruptive interference between memories.

Subject of Research: The role of dentate gyrus inhibitory interneurons in balancing memory flexibility and stability

Article Title: Study by the Institute for Neurosciences CSIC-UMH reveals how the brain balances memory flexibility and stability

Article References: Study by the Institute for Neurosciences CSIC-UMH reveals how the brain balances memory flexibility and stability. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: neuroscience, hippocampus, dentate gyrus, memory, inhibitory interneurons, pattern separation, memory encoding, computational model, PLOS Biology, CSIC, memory load, interference