A light-activated potassium channel for neuronal inhibition. This is the study that won the eighth Aspen Institute Italia Award for collaboration and scientific research between Italy and the United States. The work is the result of collaboration between the Ion Channel Biophysics laboratory of the University of Milan Department of Biosciences, led by Anna Moroni – where Laura Alberio constructed the new protein BLINK2 – and the Neuromodulation of Cortical and Subcortical Circuits Laboratory, led by Raffaella Tonini of the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia in Genoa – where Andrea Locarno demonstrated that protein’s functionality on neuronal activity.