Howard B. Eichenbaum (1947–2017)

Howard B. Eichenbaum died in Boston, Massachusetts, on July 21, 2017, at age 69, following recent spine surgery. His official titles were William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences and Director of the Center for Memory and Brain at Boston University. But he was known more broadly as one of the world’s leading lights in the study of memory and the brain, whose scientific achievements, advocacy and leadership in the field, and openness and generosity in his thinking and his interactions with younger scholars were all parts of the tremendous impact he had on science. His untimely passing is a significant loss to the neuroscience community, but his influence on an entire generation of memory researchers will continue to resonate.Howard was the most integrative of scientists. His empirical work in rodents combined high-density neuronal recordings and studies of the effects of experimental lesions, with both lines of work combining with sophisticated and innovative behavioral testing. The research he conducted was guided by and significantly advanced ideas at both the cognitive level and the brain mechanisms level of analysis. Always mindful of the most current work in both the animal and human literatures on memory, Howard had a career-long commitment to and uncommon success in reconciling these historically all-too-separate literatures. In both his empirical findings and theoretical contributions, he advanced our understanding of the nature of the representations in memory of events and of the brain mechanisms supporting these memory representations, applying to animals and humans alike.He was also an exceptionally generous scientist. There was the training, mentoring, guidance, and opportunities he provided to scores of aspiring scientists at all stages of their careers, from undergraduates in his laboratory or in classrooms to junior faculty members whose careers he helped. Most impressive was his tireless championing of the latest findings and ideas of others in the field, regardless of whether the work was from well-known colleagues or young graduate students. Howard highlighted and advocated for their work in very public ways—citing the work in his own publications (particularly in his many review articles and opinion pieces), inviting submissions by that individual or arranging for inclusion in one or another special issue of the journal Hippocampus (of which Howard was the long-time Editor-in-Chief), enlisting their participation in symposia he organized, and sometimes even arranging to work jointly on a review paper, which would then include that work and more. The number of people who have stories of the kindness he showed them is truly remarkable and a great testament to the generosity of his spirit and his exceptional humanity.Howard was born in Chicago, Illinois, on October 16, 1947, to Victor and Edith Eichenbaum. Victor had emigrated from Czechoslovakia in 1935 at age 14 and eventually moved his family to Benton Harbor, Michigan. Howard stayed in Michigan for his undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he earned a bachelor of science degree in cell biology and a PhD degree in psychology, working in the lab of Charles Butter. Howard continued his training at MIT, working as a postdoc with Stephan Chorover. In these labs, Howard learned and began to hone his skills in the neuropsychological and electrophysiological techniques, respectively, that would feature so prominently in his subsequent work.From MIT, he went on to faculty positions at Wellesley College (1977–1991), the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1991–1993), and SUNY Stony Brook (1993–1996) before returning to Massachusetts to join the faculty at Boston University (1996–2017). At these various institutions, Howard was a leader who took on great responsibility and gave much to their educational and research missions. At Wellesley College, he was chair of the interdisciplinary program in psychobiology. At Stony Brook, he was director of undergraduate studies in the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience. At Boston University, he served as director—at various times—of the program in neuroscience, the undergraduate program in neuroscience, the Center for Neuroscience, and the Center for Memory and Brain; he also served as chair of the Department of Psychology.His dedicated leadership was also well on display nationally. In addition to his long-term, creative stewardship of the journal Hippocampus, he was an editorial board member of more than a dozen other journals, served on the Council of the Society for Neuroscience and the NIMH National Advisory Mental Health Council, as well as on countless program, review, award, or steering committees, and was chair of the Section on Neuroscience, American Association for the Advancement of Science. As a consequence, his impact on the field was immense, even excluding his actual scientific contributions.Ah, but what scientific contributions he made! The work in his laboratory was distinguished by the deployment of truly elegant and sensitive tests of various aspects of memory function and memory representation in rodents. Howard made particular use of olfaction as a domain in which to test learning and memory, because of the ecological validity of the olfactory modality for rodents’ navigation of their environment. This mode of testing permitted him to obtain robust data about memory for individual olfactory objects (or items), pairs of items, sequences of items, and more complex relations among items in various spatial positions or contexts. Using these tests in animals with experimental lesions or during electrophysiological recording of neurons or neuronal networks in freely behaving animals, his group was able to obtain unparalleled information about the role in memory of the hippocampus, related medial temporal lobe structures, and hippocampal-prefrontal cortex interactions.The dominant paradigm and theoretical framework in the field at that time focused on exclusively spatial accounts of hippocampal function based on the discovery by John O’Keefe of “place cells” in the hippocampus that coded the animal’s spatial position and supported cognitive maps of the spatial environment. The use of olfactory memory paradigms permitted Howard to step outside of and thereby critically test spatial accounts. His data and other findings provided strong support for an alternative account that he offered with Neal Cohen, stating that the hippocampal system codes for, or accomplishes memory binding of, a multiplicity of relationships among the constituent elements of experience and not just spatial relations; the resulting “relational memory” is represented in a “memory space” in both humans and animals.In other work, Howard had rodents accomplish one-trial learning of lists of olfactory items, permitting tests of recognition memory performance that paralleled those in humans. He was able to show the critical role of the hippocampus in recollection-based, but not familiarity-based, recognition in rodents just as has been shown in humans.Howard’s late-career work was perhaps the most exciting of all, with the discovery of “time cells” in the hippocampus, thereby demonstrating that hippocampal networks represent events within their temporal context and not just their spatial context. His most recent writings emphasized the multiplexing of temporal and spatial information in the same hippocampal networks and proposed that temporal-spatial context information provided the foundational organizational structure of hippocampal representations for events, even as it also permitted representation of a multiplicity of relations. His theorizing about memory and brain, space and time, opened up new possibilities for the field that others, following in his footsteps, will surely be exploring in the coming years.For his many achievements, Howard was elected a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. For his many contributions to the science of memory and brain, and for all he did for and meant to our scientific community, he will be long remembered and greatly missed.Howard is survived by his wife of 35 years, Karen J. Shedlack, a physician; his two sons, Alexander E. Eichenbaum and Adam S. Eichenbaum, graduate students in clinical psychology and neuroscience, respectively; his 100-year-old mother, Edith (Kahn) Eichenbaum; his brother, Jerold Eichenbaum, and sister, Miriam Eichenbaum Drop.