The Eva Mary Kavan Prize for Excellence in Research on the Brain was established in 1999 by a generous endowment from Dr. Eva Kavan. Dr. Kavan earned her doctorate degree in medicine at Charles University in her native Prague, Czechoslovakia. She came to UCLA in 1956 at a time when there were only five hospitals performing open-heart surgery with a heart-lung machine; UCLA had one of the first teams to do open-heart surgery in the West. Dr. Kavan was a pioneer in the administration of anesthesia, utilizing the electroencephalogram to perform important research on the effects of the heart-lung machine on brain function during open-heart operations. Dr. Kavan has created this award, which is to be announced at the H.W. Magoun Lecture, to encourage a talented young scholar to pursue scientific research on the brain.
Each year a prize is given to one graduate student who has demonstrated excellence in his or her field of basic research in neuroscience. The awardee is selected by a faculty committee, which evaluates nominations solicited from the UCLA neuroscience community. One student from any neuroscience research department at UCLA receives a cash prize and a certificate of merit.

This year, Erin Gray was selected as the thirteenth recipient of the Kavan Prize for her research on the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying the ability of synapses to undergo long-lasting increases in function in response to different patterns of synaptic activity. This phenomenon, known as longterm potentiation or LTP, is thought to play an important role in the storage of new information in the brain during memory formation. Not long after joining the O'Dell laboratory Erin began a series of experiments that played a pivotal role in a collaborative study looking at the role of a novel phosphorylation site in AMPA type glutamate receptors in LTP. She was co-author on the initial publication describing the identification of this site (threonine 840 in AMPA receptor GluR1 subunits) published in 2007 in the Journal of Neuroscience and has continued to study the role of T840 phosphorylation in plasticity as part of her dissertation project. During this time Erin also initiated a series of experiments to examine whether the subunit composition of AMPA receptors changes following the induction of LTP and found, in contrast to some earlier reports, that the subunit composition of AMPA receptors is conserved following the induction of LTP. Erin published her findings (as first author) in the Journal of Neurophysiology in 2007. Finally, Erin has also studied the role of AMPA receptors in synaptic plasticity by investigating how LTP is altered in mice with a forebrain-specific knockout of GluR2 subunits. Surprisingly, Erin found that LTP is enhanced in these mice while behavioral experiments done in Michael Fanselow’s laboratory at UCLA found that these mutants exhibit profound learning deficits. Together, these finding suggest that the inappropriate or abnormal induction of LTP degrades the ability of circuits in the hippocampus to appropriately encode new information needed for learning. A manuscript describing these results was published in Plos One. Although Erin’s work in the laboratory is mainly focused on how modulation of AMPA receptors alters synaptic strength, she has also been involved in other projects. For instance, in 2007 Erin was a co-author on a manuscript in the Journal of Neurophysiology describing activity-dependent changes in transmission at recurrent, excitatory synaptic connections between hippocampal CA1 pyramidal cells. Erin also co-authored a manuscript that appeared last year in the Journal of Neuroscience Research describing the results of experiments investigating the role of the Ras effector Rin1 in extinction learning and synaptic plasticity. The results from her most recent experiments are probably her most interesting. Here, Erin has been investigating the upstream signals regulating GluR1 phosphorylation at S845 and the novel phosphorylation site at T840. Erin has found that neuronal depolarization induces a rapid and calcium-dependent dephosphorylation of these both of these sites. Remarkably, in her experiments, Erin found that while calcium influx via NMDA type glutamate receptors drives dephosphorylation of S845, activation of voltage-activated calcium channels provides the signal responsible for T840 dephosphorylation. Thus, despite the fact that these two residues on GluR1 are both dephosphorylated in an activity-dependent manner it appears that these sites are regulated by highly localized and specific calcium-dependent signaling pathways. Moreover, Erin has found that phosphorylation of S845 dramatically inhibits the ability of protein kinase C to phosphorylated GluR1 subunits at T840 and that prior phosphorylation of T840 inhibits PKAdependent phosphorylation of GluR1 at S845. This suggests that interactions between these two phosphorylation sites may provide a mechanism for integrating the effects of numerous upstream signaling pathways that regulate AMPA receptor function. A manuscript describing the results from these and other experiments should be submitted in the next few months. Erin’s accomplishments are not only evident from her publications but also from the awards and recognition she has received over the last few years. In 2008 Erin was appointed to the NIMH-funded Molecular and Cellular Neurobiology training grant here at UCLA, received her own NRSA fellowship in 2009, and in 2009 was awarded a Graduate Student Travel Award from the Society for Neuroscience to attend the Society’s annual meeting. Moreover, in 2010 Erin was one of just 200 graduate students selected to attend the Graduate Student Research Festival at NIH. She is extremely smart, hard working, and is a gifted experimentalist with strong skills in molecular biology, biochemistry, and electrophysiology. Erin is clearly at the start of an extremely promising career, and is highly deserving of the Eva Mary Kavan Award for Excellence in Neuroscience Research.

Previous Eva Kavan Prize Recipients
Year	Student	Mentor and Research Project
1999 1st Eva Kavan Prize Recipient	Albert Cha	Francisco Bezanilla Laboratory Research Project: Ion channels
2000 2nd Eva Kavan Prize Recipient	U. Valentin Nägerl	Istvan Mody Laboratory Research Project: Calbindin and other intracellular calcium-binding proteins in the calcium-buffering capacity of central neurons and the role of these proteins in temporal lobe epilepsy
2001 3rd Eva Kavan Prize Recipient	Michael Zeineh	Susan Bookheimer Laboratory Research Project: Novel methods of increasing the resolution of functional magnetic resonance imaging
2002 4th Eva Kavan Prize Recipient	Christine Bredfelt	Dario Ringach Laboratory Research Project: Focused on one of the basic transformations in visual processing observed between the lateral geniculate nucleus and primary visual cortex (area V1)
2003 5th Eva Kavan Prize Recipient	Jeffrey Gotts	Marie-Françoise Chesselet Laboratory Research Project: The mechanism by which cortical lesions induce a large increase in cell numbers in the subependymal layer of adult rats
2004 6th Eva Kavan Prize Recipient	Alison Burggren	Susan Bookheimer Laboratory Research Project: Alzheimer’s Disease
2005 7th Eva Kavan Prize Recipient	Kim Thompson	Kelsey Martin Laboratory Research Project: Pioneering studies on the mechanisms whereby signals are retrogradely transported from distal synapses to the nucleus in neurons
2006 8th Eva Kavan Prize Recipient	Mary Kay Lobo	X. William Yang Laboratory Research Project: Application of molecular genetic tools to study basal ganglia biology and disease
2007 9th Eva Kavan Prize Recipient	Joshua Johansen	H. Tad Blair Laboratory Research Project: Groundbreaking work on the circuit and computational mechanisms of teaching signal processing in the fear conditioning system
2008 10th Eva Kavan Prize Recipient	Michael Oldham	Daniel Geschwind Laboratory Research Project: Foundational research on the organization of the human brain transcriptome
2009 11th Eva Kavan Prize Recipient	Tiago Carvalho	Dean Buonomano Laboratory Research Project: How excitatory and inhibitory synaptic plasticity interact in a concerted manner to govern neuron behavior
2010 12th Eva Kavan Prize Recipient	Kate Wassum	Nigel Maidment Laboratory Research Project: Identifying dissociable roles for endogenous opioids in mediating reward palatability and incentive learning.
2011 13th Eva Kavan Prize Recipient	Erin Gray	Tom O'Dell Laboratory: Research Project: Electrophysiological and molecular studies of the role of AMPA receptor phosphorylation in synaptic plasticity.