Erin M. Schuman
Studies how neurons make and break down proteins locally in dendrites and axons; her group helped tie a rapamycin-sensitive mTOR pathway to the protein-synthesis-dependent phase of synaptic plasticity.
Director, Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, Frankfurt (since 2009) · Professor, Goethe University Frankfurt · Assistant to Full Professor of Biology, Caltech (1993–2010), and HHMI Investigator · postdoc, Stanford University (Daniel Madison lab, 1990–1993) · PhD in neuroscience, Princeton University (1990)
Department of Synaptic Plasticity, Max Planck Institute for Brain Research (Frankfurt am Main, Germany) ↗ ORCID0000-0002-7053-1005 ↗
Erin Schuman was senior author of the PNAS study (TAN2002), with Shao-Jun Tang as first author and Nahum Sonenberg's lab as collaborator. Her group found mTOR, the 4E-BPs and eIF4E in the dendrites of rat hippocampal neurons near synapses, and showed that rapamycin reduces late-phase long-term potentiation and BDNF-induced potentiation without affecting early-phase LTP. This was one of the early papers to link an mTOR-dependent translation pathway to synaptic plasticity and local protein synthesis at synapses.
Schuman did her PhD in neuroscience at Princeton and a postdoc with Daniel Madison at Stanford, then spent 1993–2010 on the Caltech biology faculty, where she was also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. Since 2009 she has been a director at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, where her department studies the mRNAs and ribosomes found in dendrites and axons and how local protein synthesis and degradation shape synapses. She is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences (2020) and received The Brain Prize in 2023.
Milestones in the Atlas
A selection, not a full bibliography: only papers that meet the Atlas inclusion criteria.
| Year | Evidence | Study |
|---|---|---|
| 2002 | M | A rapamycin-sensitive signaling pathway contributes to long-term synaptic plasticity in the hippocampus TAN2002 Senior author: rapamycin-sensitive mTOR signalling is needed for late-phase LTP and BDNF-induced potentiation in rat hippocampus, and its components sit at synapses. |
Co-authors in the Atlas
People with a profile here who share at least one study with Erin M. Schuman.
- Anne-Claude Gingras Showed in 1999 that mTOR phosphorylates 4E-BP1 in a priming two-step mechanism, and now leads work on interaction proteomics (including BioID) that maps how cells read signals such as mTORC1
- Nahum Sonenberg Co-discovered the mRNA cap-binding protein eIF4E and the 4E-BP proteins that restrain it, and showed how mTOR releases this brake to control protein synthesis
- Shao-Jun Tang Neuroscientist who, as a postdoc in Erin Schuman's group at Caltech, helped show that a rapamycin-sensitive mTOR pathway is needed for the protein-synthesis-dependent late phase of hippocampal LTP; his lab now studies chronic pain.
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