Biographies

Dr. Eve Marder
Gwendolyn Beinfield Professor of Neuroscience and Chair, Biology Department, Brandeis University
President of the Society for Neuroscience

Dr. Eve Marder is the Victor and Gwendolyn Beinfield Professor of Neuroscience and Chair of the Biology Department of Brandeis University. Marder received her Ph.D. in 1974 from UCSD, and subsequently conducted a one-year postdoc at the University of Oregon and then a 3-year postdoc at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, France. She became an assistant professor in the Biology Department at Brandeis University in 1978, and was promoted to professor in 1990. During her time at Brandeis University Professor Marder has been instrumental in the establishment of both undergraduate and graduate programs in Neuroscience.

Marder is the Chief Editor of the Journal of Neurophysiology, a position she assumed in 2002. . She has served on the editorial boards of Physiological Reviews, Journal of Neurobiology, Journal of Neuroscience, Journal of Comparative Neurology, Current Biology, Current Opinion in Neurobiology, Journal of Experimental Biology, and Journal of Comparative Physiology. Marder has served on numerous study sections and review panels for the NIH, NSF, and other funding agencies.

Marder is President of the Society for Neuroscience. Prior to this she served on the Council for the Society for Neuroscience, Council of the Biophysical Society and several APS committees. She was the 2005 Chair of the Program Committee for the Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting.

Marder is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the Biophysical Society and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She received the Miriam Salpeter Memorial Award for Women in Neuroscience, and the W.F. Gerard Prize from the Society for Neuroscience.

Marder studies the dynamics of small neuronal networks using the crustacean stomatogastric nervous system. Her work was instrumental in demonstrating that neuronal circuits are not “hard-wired” but can be reconfigured by neuromodulatory neurons and substances to produce a variety of outputs. Together with Larry Abbott, her laboratory pioneered the “dynamic clamp”. Marder was one of the first experimentalists to forge long-standing collaborations with theorists and has for more than 15 years combined experimental work with insights from modeling and theoretical studies. Starting in the early 1990’s, her lab pioneered studies of homeostatic regulation of intrinsic membrane properties, which was instrumental in stimulating work on the mechanisms by which brains remain stable while allowing for change during development and learning. Her work today focuses on understanding how stability in networks arises despite ongoing channel and receptor turnover and modulation, both in developing and adult animals. Most recently, she is studying the extent to which similar network performance can arise from different sets of underlying network parameters.