Miguel Rolando Covian (September 7, 1913 – February 5, 1992), was an Argentine-Brazilian physiologist, medical educator and writer. Biography Early life and education Covian was born in Rufino, Santa Fe Province, Argentina, on September 7, 1913. He studied at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Buenos Aires, where, while a student, he worked also as a teaching assistant in the Chair of Physiology. He graduated in 1942 and soon thereafter started a full-time career in research on Physiology, initially in collaboration with Bernardo Houssay, the great Argentine physiologist, who later was awarded with the 1947 Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology for his investigations on the interaction between the hypophysis and the pancreas in the control of glucose metabolism. From 1945 to 1948, Covian worked at the Institute of Experimental Biology and Medicine of Buenos Aires, a private research institution which Houssay and co-workers had founded in 1944, due to his dismissal from the University due to political persecution by the dictatorial regime of Juan Perón. There, he worked also with another eminent physiologist, Eduardo Braun-Menéndez, and presented his doctoral dissertation in 1948. Fellowship After his doctorate Covian went for a post-doctoral fellowship by the Rockefeller Foundation, at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, United States. There he worked on the physiology of hemidecorticated animals and neurovegetative control, with several important physiologists, such as Phillip Bard, Carl Richter and Vernon Mountcastle. He returned three years later to Argentina, to continue his participation at the Institute of Experimental Biology and Medicine, where, in 1952, he established the first experimental laboratory of neurophysiology of Argentina. Research In 1955 Covian was already well known internationally for his research on the neurophysiology of the limbic system. He accepted an invitation from Dr. Zeferino Vaz to join the faculty of the recently founded School of Medicine of Ribeirão Preto of the University of São Paulo, at Ribeirão Preto, São Paulo, Brazil, as the chairman of the Department of Physiology, a post he held until 1974 and from 1978 to 1982. Under Covian's able and humane leadership, the Department would grow to become one of the main excellence centers of research and education in Latin America, with an excellent scientific staff, with prominent researchers such as Eduardo Krieger, Renato Migliorini, César Timo-Iaria, José Antunes Rodrigues, José Venâncio Pereira Leite and fellow Argentines Maria Carmelo Lico, Andrés Negro-Vilar and Ricardo F. Marseillan. Covian was involved in