Miguel Rolando Covian

Who was Miguel Rolando Covian?

Miguel Rolando Covian, was an Argentine-Brazilian physiologist, medical educator and writer.

Covian was born in Rufino, Santa Fé 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.