The Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation has selected the Keck School of Medicine of USC to host the 2014 Lasker Lectures featuring recipients of the 2013 Lasker Awards.

The Lasker Awards — among the most respected and coveted science prizes in the world — are given each year by the foundation for outstanding basic and clinical medical research discoveries and for lifetime contributions to medical science. The awards, which carry an honorarium of $250,000 in each category, were presented on Sept. 20, 2013, in New York City.

This is the first time in the 68-year history of the foundation that a major academic medical center has hosted lectures delivered by all of the year’s winners of both the basic and clinical medical research awards.

The first lectures at USC will be given by Richard Scheller, PhD, executive vice president, research administration at Genentech, and Thomas Südhof, MD, professor of molecular and cellular physiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Südhof won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine and shared the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award for discoveries concerning rapid neurotransmitter release. Their work provides insights into how communication occurs in the brain.

They will speak at 4 p.m. on March 4 in Mayer Auditorium.

The next 2014 Lasker Lectures will be given by Graeme M. Clark, MD, Professor Emeritus at the University of Melbourne, Australia, Ingeborg Hochmair, PhD, co-founder and CEO of the cochlear implant company MED-EL, and Blake S. Wilson, co-director of the Duke Hearing Center at Duke University, who shared the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award for developing the modern cochlear implant, a device that allows the profoundly deaf to hear. It will be held at 4 p.m. on April 10 in Mayer Auditorium.