Chinese American biologist wins international award

Mu-Ming Poo, director of the Institute of Neuroscience, a branch of Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has been selected as the recipient of the 2016 Gruber Neuroscience Prize, an internationally acknowledged highest honor for researchers in this field.

The award worth $500,000 for 67-year-old Poo's seminal discoveries regarding the molecular and cell mechanisms underlying synaptic plasticity in the brain will be presented to him in San Diego at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in November, information officers with the institute said during a media briefing on Sunday.

"Through his innovative and ingenious experiments, Poo has greatly advanced knowledge of mechanisms of brain plasticity - ability to form new connections or change the strength of existing ones driven by our experiences of the world - in nerve cell," said Dr Carla Shatz, a professor of biology from Stanford University.

"He has enhanced our understanding of how synapses, the special junctions between nerve cells so crucial for all brain functions, are reinforced or weakened by neural activity," she added.

China-born Poo, who is a US citizen and the Paul Licht Distinguished Professor in Biology Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, has also made major contributions in other research areas, including neuronal polarization, maturation of the neuromuscular junction, molecular and cell mechanisms underlying axon guidance, and neurotrophic regulation of synaptic functions.

Poo said his team is currently working on physiological and physical therapies that can help alleviate some neurological disorders, such as Alzheimer's disease and depression.

"We're developing a special approach to discover any dysfunction in someone's brain system and try to find corresponding therapies through physical training and games," Poo said.