Erin
Schuman

Erin Schuman is a professor at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Germany.

In 1985 she graduated with a B.A. in Psychology at the University of Southern California, having investigated memory in human twins for her senior thesis. She went on to study for a PhD in Neuroscience at Princeton University, craving deeper insights into the brain substrates of learning and memory. She completed her PhD on associative learning in the marine snail Hermissenda crassicornis in 1990 and moved to Stanford University for her post-doctoral training, working in Dan Madison’s laboratory in the molecular and cellular physiology department.

In 1993, Schuman was offered a position at the biology faculty at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) where she remained until 2009. It was here, in 1996, that she made her important discovery that synapses can be strengthened in dendrites that have been physically severed from the cell body – challenging the dogma that the cell body is necessary for this process. From 1997-2009, she was also appointed investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

In 2009, she relocated to Frankfurt, Germany, with her husband, whom she’d met at Caltech, to found the new Max Planck Institute for Brain Research. There she expanded her previous research, discovering that more than 2,000 mRNAs exist in dendrites and axons of neurons – uncovering the great extent to which proteins can be produced locally, away from the cell body.

Schuman has won a number of prestigious awards, including the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine, the Rosenstiel Award, the Brain Prize, the Körber European Science Prize and the HFSP Nakasone Award. She is a member of The Royal Society in the UK, the National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Medicine in the US and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.