Vernon Benjamin Mountcastle was Professor Emeritus of Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University. He discovered and characterized the columnar organization of the cerebral cortex in the 1950s. Vernon Mountcastle was the first person to understand and describe how the cells in the higher regions of the brain are organised. Mountcastle was born on July 15, 1918 in Shelbyville, Kentucky. He was a graduate of Roanoke College in Virginia, where he was a member of the Sigma Chi Fraternity.  Mountcastle received numerous honours for his research, among them the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award (1983) and the National Medal of Science (1986). He died on January 11, 2015 in Baltimore, Maryland, United States.