Aziz-Zadeh receives Nimoy Knight Foundation’s Live Long and Prosper Award
October 24, 2025
Honor celebrates values of iconic “Star Trek” character Spock, such as rationality, peace, compassion and belonging.
Professor Lisa Aziz-Zadeh offers the iconic Vulcan hand salute 🖖 popularized by Nimoy (Photo courtesy of Lisa Aziz-Zadeh)
Professor Lisa Aziz-Zadeh has been named a 2025 recipient of the Live Long and Prosper Tribute Award from the Nimoy Knight Foundation. The honor celebrates those whose career work exemplifies the values of the iconic “Star Trek” character Spock — rationality, peace, compassion and belonging — originally portrayed on-screen by the late actor Leonard Nimoy.
Nimoy played the half-human, half-Vulcan character Spock for nearly 50 years, beginning with the 1964 television pilot episode of “Star Trek.” Nimoy created the iconic Vulcan hand salute 🖖 and its accompanying blessing, “live long and prosper.”
“I am deeply honored to receive the “Live Long and Prosper” Tribute Award for my research on the brain–gut–microbiome system in autism,” Aziz-Zadeh said. “I grew up watching “Star Trek” and was very inspired by Leonard Nimoy’s portrayal of Mr. Spock as a deeply complex character — balancing reason and emotion/belonging and difference.”
Aziz-Zadeh is the director of the Center for the Neuroscience of Embodied Cognition, where she utilizes behavioral and neuroimaging methods like functional MRI to better understand how the brain’s rudimentary sensorimotor systems shape higher-order cognitive processing such as language, social cognition, empathy and creativity. Her research projects have been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the US Department of Defense, the American Heart Association, Google, the Dana Foundation and others. She holds a joint appointment in the Brain and Creativity Institute at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.
Temple Grandin, world-renowned autism advocate and animal sciences professor at Colorado State University, is also a 2025 recipient of the Live Long and Prosper Award. Previous recipients include LeVar Burton, Whoopi Goldberg, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye.
The non-profit Nimoy Knight Foundation, named in memory of Nimoy, is overseen by his daughter, Julie Nimoy, and her husband, David Knight.
“Thank you to the Nimoy Knight Foundation,” Aziz-Zadeh said. “May we all live long and prosper!”
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