Walle Nauta

Who was Walle Nauta?

Dr. Walle J. H. Nauta was a leading neuroscientist. Nauta was born in 1916 in Medan, Dutch East Indies. He was an Institute Professor at MIT.

He invented the Nauta Silver Impregnation Method stain, used for tracing degenerating nerve fibers.

He attended the University of Leiden from 1934 to 1941, and received an MD degree in 1942 and a PhD in anatomy and neurophysiology in 1945 from the University of Utrecht.

He taught at the University of Utrecht, the University of Leiden, the University of Zurich, the University of Maryland, and at MIT, where he was named Institute Professor in 1973. He was a neurophysiologist in the Division of Neuropsychiatry at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and a neuroanatomist at McLean Hospital.

Dr. Nauta was the author or co-author of more than 100 papers for professional journals and books.

In 1994 Nauta was awarded the NAS Award in the Neurosciences from the National Academy of Sciences. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Society for Neuroscience, which he served as president, the American Association of Anatomists and the American Neurological Association. He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1994.