Kavli Prize in Neuroscience awarded for the discovery that neurons make proteins far from the cell body

The 2026 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience has been awarded to Christine Holt, Kelsey Martin, Erin Schuman and Oswald Steward for establishing that neurons manufacture proteins far out along their own branches rather than only in the cell body. The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters announced the award in Oslo on 10 June 2026. The citation reads: “for the discovery of local protein translation in neurons and establishing its importance for brain development and plasticity.”

The four laureates share USD 1,000,000. The announcement was made by Annelin Eriksen, President of The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. The Kavli Prize is awarded every second year in astrophysics, nanoscience and neuroscience, and 2026 is the tenth round since the prize was first awarded in 2008. Affiliations as published are Christine Holt, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom; Kelsey Martin, Simons Foundation, United States; Erin Schuman, Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, Frankfurt, Germany; and Oswald Steward, University of California, Irvine, United States.

Until this work, the accepted account placed protein synthesis in the cell body alone. It begins to come apart with an electron-microscopy observation Oswald Steward made in 1982. He found that ribosomes, the machines that assemble proteins, sit directly beneath dendritic spines, where synapses form, rather than only in the cell body. In the mid-1990s, and notably in 1996, Erin Schuman showed that dendrites physically severed from the neuronal cell body could still strengthen their synapses. That is possible only if the proteins required for the change are manufactured on site.

Christine Holt extended the finding to growing axons, showing that a growth cone navigating toward its target translates messenger RNA locally. Kelsey Martin linked local translation to long-term memory storage at individual synapses. Each laureate came at the question from a different compartment of the neuron: the dendritic spine, the severed dendrite, the growing axon and the individual synapse. Taken together, the four bodies of work rewrote the textbook account of how synapses strengthen during learning and how developing nerve fibres find their targets.

Edvard Moser, Chair of the Kavli Prize Committee in Neuroscience and himself a 2014 Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine, said: “These discoveries have helped us understand how the thousands of synapses hosted by a single brain cell can function independently and give rise to the information processing capability of neuronal networks.”

The mechanism gives a single neuron thousands of semi-autonomous computing units. That is central to how the brain stores information at synaptic rather than cellular resolution, since each of those units can be modified on its own rather than at the level of the whole cell.

The clinical relevance runs in two directions. Disrupted local translation is implicated in fragile X syndrome, autism spectrum conditions and neurodegenerative disease. It is also implicated in the failure of injured axons in the central nervous system to regenerate.

The Kavli Prize is a partnership of The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, The Kavli Foundation in the United States and the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research. Ten laureates were named across the three fields in the 2026 round. The European Research Council noted that five of those ten have held ERC funding.

The award ceremony was set for September 2026 in Oslo, and the medals were presented there. The next round of Kavli Prizes will be announced in 2028.