Published: November 16, 2008

Neuroscience Prize winner Mauro Costa-Mattioli. Source: Eppendorf

Neuroscience 2008, Washington, DC, Nov. 16—Mauro Costa-Mattioli has won the 2008 Eppendorf & Science Prize for Neurobiology. The Baylor College of Medicine researcher studies long-term synaptic plasticity, learning, and memory. His winning essay, “Switching memories ON and OFF” (reprised in his award lecture, which was delivered in the auditorium of AAAS headquarters), describes how control of protein synthesis influences memory formation.

In particular, Costa-Mattioli demonstrated that phosphorylation of the translation-initiation factor eIF2α acts as a memory switch in mice; reducing eIF2α phosphorylation enhances long-lasting synaptic changes and memory. Increasing phosphorylation in the hippocampus, on the other hand, depresses memory formation.

Costa-Mattioli received his bachelor’s degree from the Uruguayan University of the Republic in Montevideo, his masters from Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, and his Ph.D. from the University of Nantes, followed by a post-doc at McGill University in Montreal before moving to his current post earlier this year.

There was a distinctly international flavor to this year’s awards, as Science deputy editor Katrina Kelner remarked on during the presentations. Claudio Hetz (University of Chile, Santiago) wrote on “Protein misfolding disorders and endoplasmic reticulum stress signals,” and Hendrikje Nienborg (National Eye Institute, Bethesda, MD) presented “Visual perception: Interactions between sensory and decision processes.” Nienborg earned her masters degree from Oxford University and her M.D. and Ph.D. from the University of Munich. Hetz received his A.B. from the University of Chile, his Ph.D. from the Serono Pharmaceutical Research Institute in Geneva, and completed a post-doc at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard.