Martha Constantine-Paton

Investigator, McGovern Institute for Brain Research; Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Biology. Made pioneering discoveries concerning the role of nervous system activity in driving changes in neural structure and function, processes crucial in early childhood development and important to understand when setting education policy. In 1978 study, using microsurgery on embryos she generated three-eyed frogs and demonstrated that eye-specific ocular dominance stripes like those in mammals can form in the frog brain, which normally lacks such stripes, if regions that receive input from one eye instead receive input from two. She also demonstrated the role of neural activity in developmental neural plasticity in both the visual and auditory systems (1983) and showed that the NMDA glutamate receptor (NMDAR) is required for this activity-dependent plasticity (e.g., 1987, 1992) and controls protein synthesis at developing synapses in response to neural activity (2000); discovered molecular mechanisms of activity-dependent neural plasticity involving the protein phosphatase calcineurin (2000), the scaffolding protein PSD-95 (2003), the neurotrophic factor BDNF and two of its downstream signaling pathways, the PI3 kinase/AKT signaling pathway (2007) and the PCLgamma pathway (2011); has defined the role of the myosinVa motor protein in organizing the glutamate synapse post-synaptic density (2013) and is currently studying the role of this molecule in neuropsychiatric disease and developing novel approaches to study the visual system and the developing brain with the goals of understanding activity-dependent brain development and, more generally, identifying novel approaches to the correction of deficits caused by ocular and brain trauma, developmental neglect and aging.