Oswald
Steward

Oswald Steward is a distinguished professor of anatomy and neurobiology at University of California, Irvine (UCI), and founding director of the Reeve-Irvine Research Center. Having initially struggled in high school, Steward’s academic interests grew when he met his future wife Kathy and her friends. He eventually turned his studies around and graduated with a B.A. in Psychobiology from the University of Colorado in 1970. As a graduate student in the 1970s, Steward worked with Gary Lynch and Carl Cotman at UCI, investigating how the rat brain responds to injury.

Steward received his PhD in 1974 and was hired as a faculty member by the University of Virginia straight after. He eventually became the founding chair of its department of neuroscience and Harrison Foundation professor of neuroscience and neurosurgery.

In 1982, Steward used an electron microscope to discover that polyribosomes (machinery that enables protein synthesis) existed in dendrites. This was hugely surprising, suggesting that proteins could be produced locally near the synapses rather than in the cell body, as was previously thought. In 1999, Steward was recruited as professor and founding director of the Reeve-Irvine Research Center at his alma mater institution UCI, where he explored synaptic connections and the mechanisms of mRNA sorting and transport in neurons.

Steward has already received a number of awards, including an NIH Research Career Development Award, the Jacob Javits Neuroscience Investigator Award, the NINDS Landis Award for Outstanding Mentorship and the Distinguished Investigator Award from the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression (NARSAD). He is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.