This year's highly prestigious Champalimaud  Vision Award is shared between two worthy winners for their ground-breaking research in neuroscience and how the brain contructs images.

The $1.3 million award, the largest of its kind in ophthalmology will be shared between J Anthony Movshon, director of New York University’s Centre for Neural Science and William T. Newsome, a neuroscientist at Stanford University. 

For over three decades both scientists have worked jointly and separately on the way our brains process visual information, supporting our perception. Leonor Beleza, president of The Champalimaud Foundation, said: Visual perception starts with the eyes, but it happens in the brain. Over a 30-year period, the work of Movshon and Newsome has taken this axiom to new scientific levels of understanding. Because of these two outstanding neuroscientists, we now have a fundamental appreciation for the role of neurons in how we see things move about in the world. Their ground-breaking work, taken together and individually, has laid the basis for continued research on how the brain and its processes impact vision and perception. We are very proud to recognize Movshon and Newsome as the recipients of the 2010 Champalimaud Vision Award.

 William Newsome heard about the award following a weekly lab meeting when he listened to his mobile phone messages: There was a message from my wife telling me an ophthalmologist in Portugal had called and told her he was absolutely sure I would really, really want to call him back. The ophthalmologist turned out to be a member of the Champalimaud jury panel: Alfred Summer, MD, dean of the School of Hygiene and Public Health and professor of ophthalmology, epidemiology and international health at Johns Hopkins University.

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This year's highly prestigious Champalimaud Vision Award is shared between two worthy winners for their ground-breaking research in neuroscience and how the brain contructs images.