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 EMBO member and a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. In 2018 she received the Society for Neuroscience’s Salpeter Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2020 she was awarded the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine, the FENS-Kavli-ALBA Diversity Prize, and she was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences. In 2022, she was awarded the EMBO-FEBS Women in Science prize.