GoKawiilEvery memory begins with tiny changes inside the brain. A discovery that helped explain those changes has earned neuroscientist Oswald Steward one of science’s highest honors.
Steward received the 2026 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience, a USD 1 million award and one of science’s most prestigious awards, for research that transformed scientists’ understanding of how the brain learns and stores memories. Steward and his colleagues won the prize for discovering that neurons, the cells that carry information through the brain and nervous system, can manufacture proteins near synapses, the connections where brain cells communicate.
The finding has reshaped neuroscience and could eventually lead to new treatments for neurological disorders.
“It was not a conclusion that was really in line with what other people were thinking at the time,” Steward told IBM Think in an interview. “We sort of stuck to it, dog to a bone, couldn’t let go.”
Steward shares the prize with Christine Holt, Kelsey Martin and Erin Schuman for discoveries that established the importance of local protein synthesis, the process by which cells build proteins, within neurons. Scientists now regard the process as fundamental to learning, memory and brain plasticity, the brain’s ability to reorganize itself in response to experience.
The discovery dates to research Steward began more than four decades ago, when scientists still believed proteins were manufactured primarily in a neuron’s cell body.
“It is the thrill of discovery,” he said. “There’s just something about it that you can’t really explain or find in any other situation.”