The 2025 Donald B. Lindsley Prize in Behavioral Neuroscience was awarded to Brendan Ito, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in the Froemke Lab at the Neuroscience Institute at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine. As a graduate student at Cornell University, Ito, working with Teja Bollu, led a project to develop new methods to track mouse tongue kinematics with decamicron-millisecond spatiotemporal precision as mice licked water from a spout. To test if mice can produce on-the-fly corrections during licking that are analogous to those studied in primate reach tasks, he pioneered a new behavioral paradigm to induce spout misses within single licks. Mice rapidly detected misses and re-aimed their tongues within the same movement, revealing online control during licking, and photoinhibition and electrophysiological recordings showed that the orofacial motor cortex was required for these corrections. Noticing that mice seemed to re-aim licks after off-center tongue-spout contacts, Ito developed a second task in which subtle, unexpected touches on the tongue guided subsequent licks toward the contact site. Surprisingly, touch-guided re-aiming did not require the orofacial motor or sensory cortex, but instead relied on the superior colliculus (SC), a midbrain structure classically associated with orienting. Using electrophysiology, viral tracing, and optogenetics, Ito, alongside Yongjie Gao, discovered a previously unknown topographically organized mechanosensory-to-motor map of the tongue in the SC where posterior SC activations evoke more temporal-directed licking and anterior sites evoke more nasal-directed licking. Together, Ito’s work, detailed in two first-author Nature articles, revealed fundamental principles for the control of movement. During his PhD studies, Ito mentored six other scientists, and he continues to mentor as a postdoctoral scholar.