Schuman Receives 2026 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience

Former Caltech professor Erin Schuman has been named a recipient of the 2026 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. Schuman, who is now director at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Germany, shares the prize with three other neuroscientists for their discovery of "local protein translation in neurons and establishing its importance for brain development and plasticity."

Schuman, along with her co-recipients Christine Holt, Kelsey Martin, and Oswald Steward, study the fundamental cellular biology of brain cells called neurons. Together they have identified how individual neurons form, maintain, and modify thousands of synaptic connections, each of which might have different dynamic properties.

Before founding the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in 2009, Schuman began her professorial career at Caltech in 1993. In an oral history interview, Schuman recalls Caltech as an "absolute paradise" to do science.

At Caltech, Schuman was mentored by the late Norman Davidson, the Norman Chandler Professor of Chemical Biology, Emeritus, and made a landmark discovery in 1996—just three years into her academic position—that neurons can synthesize proteins outside the cell body and within dendrites, a phenomenon called local protein synthesis.

"It was thought that all neuronal proteins were made in the cell body," Schuman recalls in her oral history interview. "It took a lot of work and a lot of careful experiments to convince a very skeptical field that protein synthesis occurs in neuronal processes. We discovered there's a form of plasticity that requires protein synthesis that's very far away from the cell bodies. And that was a puzzle, it was not something that had been integrated into the way people think about neurons."

Schuman was recognized by the Kavli Foundation for an expansion of her early findings, showing that mRNAs are translated locally in dendrites both at baseline and in response to synaptic activity. She demonstrated that local protein synthesis is required for forms of long-lasting synaptic plasticity in the mammalian hippocampus—a brain region critical to memory consolidation—thus explaining how individual synapses acquire the newly synthesized proteins needed to support persistent functional changes.

Schuman also created powerful molecular tools to identify and visualize newly synthesized proteins at high resolution, thereby elucidating how mRNA levels and protein synthesis and degradation are regulated within distinct subcellular compartments. Her work has had broad impact on our understanding of mRNA biology and the local control of protein synthesis, extending far beyond the nervous system.

"Erin's work has provided deep insight into the molecular mechanisms that underlie developmental and adaptive changes in the brain," says Caltech Provost David Tirrell. "Her key results and insights have moved us closer to understanding how it is that we learn and how we remember."

The Kavli Prize in Neuroscience is awarded biennially for outstanding achievement in advancing our knowledge and understanding of the brain and nervous system, including molecular neuroscience, cellular neuroscience, systems neuroscience, neurogenetics, developmental neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, computational neuroscience, and related facets of the brain and nervous system.