Erin Schuman
Erin Schuman
Erin Schuman was born in 1963 in California. After completing her B.A. in Psychology at the University of Southern California, she received her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Princeton University. She conducted postdoctoral studies in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Physiology at Stanford University. In 1993, she was appointed to the Biology Faculty at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). From 1997-2009, Erin Schuman was appointed Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). In 2009, she moved with her husband Gilles Laurent to Frankfurt, Germany to design and found the new Max Planck Institute for Brain Research.
Erin Schuman has a long-standing interest in molecular and cell biological processes that control protein synthesis and degradation in neurons and their synapses.
The complex morphology of neurons, with most synapses located hundreds of microns from the cell body, presents a logistical challenge for the establishment, maintenance and modification of local synaptic proteomes.
Erin Schuman’s work has been instrumental in demonstrating that neurons have solved this problem by localizing important cell biological machines, including ribosomes and proteasomes, within dendrites and axons.
Following on the lab’s initial discovery in 1996 that proteins made locally in dendrites are required for synaptic plasticity, Erin Schuman has identified in molecular detail the mRNA and ribosome population present in neuronal dendrites and axons. In addition, her lab has developed new tools to label, purify, identify and visualize newly synthesized proteins in neurons and other cells using non-canonical amino acid metabolic labelling, click chemistry, and mutation of cell-biological enzymes (the BONCAT and FUNCAT techniques). Taken together, the lab’s work has elucidated how gene expression can be regulated in the minute subcellular space of the synapse and how decentralization of cell biological machines allows the single neuron to manage subcellular proteomes in a vast volume.
These transformative discoveries have expanded and solidified the field of local translation as a key mediator of synaptic function and Erin Schuman’s work has fuelled the development of new technologies that have been widely adopted across neuroscience and non-neuroscience labs around the world.
The Brain Prize 2023 is also awarded to:
