Picower staff member wins Gruber research award

The Society for Neuroscience has awarded Jason Shepherd, a staff affiliate at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, the Peter and Patricia Gruber International Research Award in Neuroscience. The award recognizes promising young scientists for their outstanding research and educational pursuit in an international setting. 

Shepherd is a John Hopkins University graduate, who is originally from New Zealand. He has made important contributions to understanding the mechanisms underlying long-term synaptic plasticity. He showed that the immediate early gene Arc is important in vesicular trafficking in brain cells, which is important for neural communication.