July 7, 1940 – September 28, 2023
Peter Schwindt was an exceptional scientist who served the department from his graduate student days until he retired in 2000. Peter, with his long-term collaborator Wayne Crill and many trainees, performed pioneering studies using two-electrode voltage-clamp on spinal motoneurons in situ. Those studies provided fundamental insight into mechanisms that control the relation between a neuron’s synaptic input and its action potential output. Some notable highlights were the discovery of a low threshold, persistent calcium conductance that enables repetitive firing in motoneurons and multiple potassium conductances that control action potential firing rate. Later, Peter was one of the early developers of in vitro brain slice preparation, which he exploited to study the input-output functions of neocortical neurons. His work on the neocortex led to discovery of the persistent sodium conductance, and multiple potassium conductances, including the first discovery of a sodium-dependent potassium conductance, that controls spike frequency adaptation over multiple time scales.
Peter’s career had several distinct phases. He earned his first doctorate in engineering which led to a position in Boeing’s space program. Some years later he remarked at his pleasure that a satellite heat shield he had designed was still working properly up in space. After his brief stint as an aerospace engineer, Peter returned to graduate school in the department of Physiology & Biophysics, where he earned his second doctorate under the supervision of Bill Calvin in 1972. Following his postdoctoral studies with Wolfgang Precht at the Max-Planck Institute in Frankfurt, Germany, he returned to the Department of Physiology & Biophysics as a faculty member where he collaborated with Wayne Crill and rose through the ranks to full professor. After Peter and Wayne closed their lab, Peter briefly joined the Spain Lab, where he performed computational work on synaptic depression that resulted in a landmark paper which Chuck Stevens declared in a Nature News and Views article “…provided the first documented use for such plasticity…”.
In addition to his own scientific accomplishments, Peter was a valued mentor to many. He developed a course for our graduate students on the “Properties of Neurons” which became an essential component of the training that all of our students interested in neuronal electrical signaling and synaptic integration received. One grateful student (Guy Tribble), for whom Peter served as thesis advisor, endowed the Crill Professorship, now held by Dr. Beth Buffalo, Chair of the Department.
Following his retirement from UW, Peter immersed himself in local politics, serving as a councilman in the Shoreline District. In that role, Peter was instrumental in having the zoning laws changed to protect green spaces.
Peter was a gentle soul and generally avoided the limelight. His strong preference was to remain fixed to the bench, performing the experiments and collecting the data that his colleagues would enthusiastically present at national and international meetings. One memorable exception to this rule was Peter’s participation in a small satellite meeting of the Society for Neuroscience on the function of potassium channels. As one of the three keynote speakers, Peter gave a memorable talk on the properties of the potassium conductances that he had discovered in the principal neurons of neocortex. During his talk, Peter made a joke about A-currents that caused Eric Kandel to convulse in laughter so loud that it might have been measurable on the Richter scale.
Peter spent his later years visiting with his two adult sons, traveling, and hiking in the Sierra Mountains with his high school sweetheart.
-Bill Spain