Since joining the Otago psychology department in 1981, Prof Abraham had made outstanding contributions to the understanding of neural mechanisms underlying memory storage in healthy and diseased brains, university officials said yesterday.
Many influential scientific articles had resulted, including in leading international journals such as Nature.
Prof Abraham was humbled to get a "very special" prize: "To have your home university recognise your work is a rewarding experience."
Otago University had made a strong commitment to research excellence, and the high quality of his colleagues and students had contributed greatly to the development of his research career, he said yesterday.
University vice-chancellor Prof Sir David Skegg said the award recognised that Prof Abraham had made an "outstanding contribution to neuroscience and the potential of his work to advance our understanding of brain disease".
His work had provided important insights into processes involving changes in strength of the synaptic connections between nerve cells.
These changes - involving synaptic plasticity - are believed to underpin learning and memory.
In the 1990s, he discovered and named metaplasticity, which has helped revolutionise thinking about how synaptic plasticity processes might operate.
His current interdisciplinary research with Otago biochemist Prof Warren Tate and Dr Joanna Williams, of anatomy and structural biology, focuses on a little-understood protein called secreted amyloid precursor protein-alpha, the production of which is limited in the brain cells of Alzheimers sufferers.
"We're very interested in how that neuroprotective protein works," Prof Abraham said.
The researchers were also interested in how this protein could be used to counteract a neurotoxic peptide in the brain.
Originally from the United States, Prof Abraham gained a PhD in neuroscience from the University of Florida in 1981, before joining the Otago department.
The founding director of the university's Brain Health and Repair Research Centre, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 1997.
He was awarded the society's James Cook Research Fellowship in 2007.