Zeki Wins King Faisal Science Prize

The King Faisal Foundation in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, announced in January that Semir Zeki is the winner of this year’s King Faisal International Prize for Science (Biology). He received a certificate that is handwritten in Diwani calligraphy, a gold medal, and a cash prize of 750 000 Saudi Arabia riyals (about $200 000).

Zeki, professor of neurobiology at University College London, was honored for his work on the organization of the visual brain. His contributions, said the citation, have had a “tremendous impact on the biology of vision.” The citation added that Zeki was “the first to show that the visual brain consists of different areas that are functionally specialized to process and perceive different attributes of the visual scene.” His subsequent studies have revealed that “the visual brain perceives different attributes such as motion and color at different times, leading to the now widely accepted theory of temporal asynchrony in vision, which maintains that the visual consciousness consists of many different micro-consciousnesses that are distributed in space and time.”

The King Faisal International Prize for Science was first awarded in 1984. Science prizes rotate annually; next year’s topic will be physics.