Born in 1963 in the USA. B.A. in Psychology at the University of Southern California (1985),  Ph.D. in Neuroscience at Princeton University (1990). Post-doctoral fellowship at the Stanford University. Assistant Professor at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) (1993), Associate Professor (1999), Full Professor (2004). Appointed Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI)(1997). Director of the Department of Synaptic Plasticity at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research (since 2009).

Erin Schuman is an elected member of EMBO, the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the US National Academy of Sciences, and the UK Royal Society. She received the Society for Neuroscience’s Salpeter Lifetime Achievement Award (2018), the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine (2020), the FENS-Kavli-ALBA Diversity Prize (2020), the EMBO Women in Science Award (2022), the Rosenstiel Award (2023), the Brain Prize (2023), the Körber Prize (2024), and the HFSP Nakasone Award (for 2026).