When the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research wanted to bring the award-winning neurobiologist Erin Schuman from the United States to Frankfurt as director 13 years ago, she made one condition: the new institute building on Riedberg, which was already planned at the time, had to be connected to a daycare center, a baby changing room and get a comfortable nursing room.

Her own three daughters had already outgrown the daycare age – but Schuman knew from his own experience the difficulties that women have in research.

"If you drop out for a year or more because you have children, your career is quickly over," she says.

Under no circumstances did she want to ask her future employees to make a decision between science and family.

Almost two out of three women never return to work after having more than one child, up from more than a third with just one.

The unusual contract negotiations were successful.

Above all because Schuman, now 59 years old, is an impressive scientist and personality.

The list of her awards, lectures, publications and activities is 25 pages long.

Just last spring she received the FEBS EMBO Women in Science Award, which is presented by the Federation of European Biochemical Societies and the European Molecular Biology Organization.

Her specialty is synapses, the contact points of nerve cells.

medicine and psychology

As she explains what she's doing, she uses her hands to draw the jagged outlines of nerve cells in the air and raves about the beauty of the images as she first developed new visualization techniques for proteins.

She exudes a lot of enthusiasm.

Others tell of a sparkling starry sky in uninhabited parts of the world.

"I've always been interested in everything unknown": This is how she explains her motivation for science even as a young woman, the first in her family to become an academic.

At first she ended up in medicine and psychology, until she realized that although she was fascinated by the brain, she wanted to delve into its micro dimensions.

Schuman was the first to show that proteins formed near synapses play an important role in learning and memory.

This is not only an important finding for science, but also has practical implications for the research and treatment of neurological diseases such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and autism.

Neurobiology researches the basics, pharmacologists and doctors can use them to develop treatment methods.

During the corona pandemic, one of Schuman's project groups discovered that certain proteins are increasingly produced in the brains of zebrafish the more conspecifics they are surrounded by.

A still relatively unexplored neuropeptide apparently captures the social environment.

It is likely that this regulates the "social brain" and behavioral networks, says the professor.

Goal: More women at Max Planck

Schuman is also committed outside of her lab: She has campaigned to significantly increase the proportion of women among the Max Planck Directors, to 20 percent by 2020, now there are 23. When she started in 2009, her predecessors were all men, all in all only ten percent of all Max Planck directors were women.

She is one of three in her institute, the other two are men.

She is married to one of them, Gilles Laurent, and they both head different research areas.

A happy coincidence for family life, which is clearly compromised when partners have to prove the excellence of their research on different continents.

However, half of the institutes in Germany have never had a female director, she reports.

"There is still a lot to do." She speaks English,