UCLA alumnus Ardem Patapoutian will share the 2021 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. The neuroscientist helped answer fundamental question about how nervous system senses temperature and touch.

UCLA Newsroom | October 4, 2021—Patapoutian, a professor of neuroscience at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, shares the honor with David Julius, a UC San Francisco professor of physiology, for their discoveries of receptors in the body that respond to temperature and touch. Specifically, their research explains how temperature and pressure are converted into electrical impulses in the nervous system.

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