Beth Stevens is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School in the F.M. Kirby Neurobiology Center at Boston Children’s Hospital, and an institute member of the Broad Institute and the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research. Her research focuses on understanding how neural-immune interactions in the brain sculpt synapses during normal development and disease. She and her team discovered that microglia, the brain’s resident immune cells, prune neural connections in response to signals from the classical complement pathway, a branch of the immune system. Her lab has uncovered a diverse set of immune molecules that regulate this process in the brain during normal development, providing insights into the pathological synapse loss of Alzheimer’s and other age-related neurodegenerative diseases and schizophrenia. She has adopted an interdisciplinary approach that straddles the fields of genetics, immunology and neuroscience to understand how neural-immune interactions regulate brain wiring, neural circuit function and behavior. Stevens received her B.S. from Northeastern University. She carried out her graduate research at the National Institutes of Health and received her Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, College Park. She completed her postdoctoral research at Stanford University with Ben Barres.
Projects:
Conserved regulatory pathways in age-related loss of plasticity and cognitive function
Glial mechanisms by which sleep preserves cognitive function and plasticity in aging