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, Tiago Carvalho was selected as the eleventh recipient of the Kavan Prize for his research concerning how excitatory and inhibitory synaptic plasticity interact in a concerted manner to govern neuron behavior. Tiago is a graduate student working in the Department of Neurobiology as a fellow from the Gulbenkian Graduate Program in Portugal. Working in the laboratory of Dr. Dean Buonomano, Tiago has completed two outstanding and original projects. They were both essentially independent from each other, and their scope and range are a testament to Tiago’s intellectual and experimental range. His first project was recently accepted for publication in the March 2009 issue of Neuron. His premise is that while synaptic plasticity has been primarily studied in the context of changes in subthreshold EPSPs, it is ultimately the net effect of excitatory and inhibitory plasticity on spike generation that will determine the role of plasticity in changing the input-output relationship of neurons, and thus in potentially changing the behavior of an animal. Tiago generated a theoretical neural network model to characterize the effects of excitatory and inhibitory plasticity on the input-output function of neurons – and demonstrated that excitatory plasticity primarily changes the input threshold required to fire a neuron, while inhibitory plasticity changes the ‘gain’ or sensitivity to the input. He next tested the predictions of his model using a number of experimental techniques including whole-cell recordings from hippocampal pyramidal neurons. Together his theoretical and experimental approach have created a compelling and novel story which may explain why both excitatory and inhibitory synapses are plastic, as well as the computational trade-off between both types of plasticity. Tiago’s second project is also highly original. In it he proposes a novel functional role for a well-defined form of synaptic plasticity: short-term plasticity, in which the strength of synapses varies in a use-dependent fashion on the time scale of hundreds of milliseconds. Specifically, short-term synaptic plasticity has traditionally been thought of as being more or less ‘static’ – that is, given synapses exhibit a particular time course and magnitude of plasticity, which may be primarily determined by developmental programs or be indirectly shaped by traditional associative forms of long-term synaptic. Tiago has proposed that short-term plasticity may itself be regulated in a specific manner to optimize the processing of temporal information. In essence, this novel learning rule extends Hebb’s rule into the temporal domain. Tiago Carvalho is an outstanding graduate student highly deserving of the Eva Kavan Prize.

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