Leslie Ungerleider, 1946–2020: Who, what, and where

Abstract

Leslie Ungerleider, a pioneering neuroscientist who profoundly shaped our understanding of the visual system, died unexpectedly but peacefully at her home on December 11, 2020, at the age of 74. She was the Chief of the Laboratory of Brain and Cognition at the National Institute of Mental Health and an NIH Distinguished Investigator. Despite struggling with health issues in recent years, she remained vibrant and fully engaged in science until her abrupt passing, leaving many colleagues, collaborators, and mentees in shock. Leslie’s intellectual legacy runs both deep and broad, as she made major contributions to our understanding of the functional organization of the visual cortex in humans and nonhuman primates using a combination of neuroanatomical, neurophysiological, neuroimaging, and behavioral methods. Leslie is best known for demonstrating that the primate visual cortex contains separate neural systems for perceiving “what” things are and “where” they are located. Leslie was an ardent supporter of women in neuroscience and was a highly inspirational role model, starting at a time when there were far fewer female senior neuroscientists than in the present day. In her many leadership positions across multiple scientific organizations, she was a passionate advocate for women. More broadly, the depth to which she influenced those she mentored, collaborated, or interacted closely with revealed itself in the outpouring of sentiment in the days immediately following her passing (1). Leslie was not only a brilliant and influential scientist, but equally notably, she deeply cared about all of her laboratory members as well as the community, and was gifted in communicating at all levels. She fully engaged with whomever she was talking with and suffered the details to get all aspects of doing science right, from the experimental design to the final write-up. While kind, Leslie was also blunt, direct, and honest. Under her mentorship, her laboratory members thrived. Leslie received her undergraduate degree in psychology from Harper College (later renamed the State University of New York) in Binghamton, New York. Intrigued by animal behavior, she entered graduate school at New York University and in 1970 received a doctorate in experimental psychology by studying hypothalamic stimulation effects on rat behavior; her first peer-reviewed publication was in Science (2). After a brief period at the University of Oklahoma, Leslie joined the laboratory of Karl Pribram at Stanford in order to study the effects of brain lesions on visual perception in macaque monkeys. Mortimer Mishkin, a leading neuroscientist at the NIH, having heard Leslie talk about her work at the 1974 Society for Neuroscience meeting, initiated a conversation with her to discuss seemingly conflicting findings from his own laboratory, then invited her to the NIH to “sort things Leslie Ungerleider. Image credit: Michael Beauchamp (Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA).