Dr. Eve Marder
University Professor, Brandeis University
Postdoctoral Fellow, École Normale Supérieure
PhD UC San Diego
Dr. Eve Marder’s scientific aspirations began in the library. An insatiable young reader growing up in a small town in New Jersey, she worked through entire shelves of books in the local library - fiction, history, science, anything and everything. One day, a relative interrupted her mid-book to ask what she wanted to be when she grew up. Glancing down at the science book in her hands, she replied, almost reflexively, “I’m going to be a scientist!”. Seeing how this answer satisfied her relative and fended off further questioning, she adopted this henceforth as her go-to response. It wasn’t until later that she fully embraced that declared aspiration and channeled her voracious curiosity into deciphering the organizational logic of the nervous system. Today, Eve is a University Professor and Victor and Gwendolyn Beinfield Professor of Neuroscience at Brandeis University, where her lab studies how intrinsic and environmental factors shape flexible neural circuit function.
Although Eve enjoyed (and excelled in) most subjects throughout high school, the political activism of the 1960’s and her own involvement with the civil rights movement led her to enter college with the goal of becoming a civil rights lawyer. But while a particularly dreadful politics course quenched that spark, it did not dissuade her from her determination to pursue a graduate degree, regardless of the topic. This seed had been planted long ago by her father; when a young Eve had expressed dismay at the statistical improbability of finding her 'one special person' in the whole world, her father reassured her by saying, "Don't worry about getting married. Get your PhD first." That seed finally made roots during an abnormal psychology class, where a lecture on schizophrenia introduced her for the first time to the concept of inhibition in the brain. Captivated by this phenomenon, she chose it as the topic for her term paper and devoured everything she could find on the subject. From then on, she knew: neuroscience was her path.
Upon applying to PhD programs in neurobiology, Eve chose to attend the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) – both for the scientific environment where she thought she could be sufficiently challenged, and for the literal environment (i.e., the beach). As a neuroscience student in the Biology PhD program, she joined the lab of Dr. Allen (Al) Selverston, a new faculty member and the sole neuroscientist in the department at the time. There wasn’t even a conversation; at the end of her first summer, she simply settled herself into his lab, and he never told her to leave.
After about a year in the lab, Eve switched from working on the cardiac ganglion to a different preparation that Al had recently started working with – the stomatogastric ganglion (STG). The STG consists of just 30 or so neurons that control the motion of the foregut in crustaceans like crabs and lobsters. It is a classic example of a central pattern generator, meaning that it can maintain rhythmic activity output in the absence of timing from external sources. For Eve, this was a promising system in which to address a central question that had bothered her ever since that term paper on inhibition during college: why were there so many different neurotransmitters in the brain? At the time, neurotransmitters like glutamate, GABA, acetylcholine, and more were studied in isolation in specific parts of the brain. Eve thought that if she could work out all of the neurotransmitters in a functional circuit like the STG, she might be able to decipher the logic of transmitter allocation and function. Thus, for her PhD, Eve used electrophysiology, biochemistry, and pharmacology to discover that acetylcholine acts as an excitatory neurotransmitter at some of the neuromuscular synapses in the lobster STG, while the others use glutamate.
To continue working out the rest of the neurotransmitter and neuromodulatory components of the STG, Eve then went on to a postdoctoral position at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris to work with Drs. JacSue Kehoe, Philippe Ascher, and Hirsh Gershenfeld. She chose this position not only because they were doing exceptional neuropharmacology work, but also to escape the politics in the United States at the time of the Vietnam War. When lobsters similar to those she’d been working with at UCSD were deemed “trop cher” (too expensive) by her new mentors, she developed a relationship with fishermen at the local fish market to buy the much cheaper crabs. With those crabs, Eve made further strides in characterizing the physiological responses and receptor properties of various neurotransmitters in the crab STG, thus paving the way towards her ultimate goal of deciphering the circuit logic of diverse neurotransmission in her own lab.
Since starting her lab at Brandeis University in 1978, Eve’s discoveries and accomplishments have been numerous and significant, positioning her among the most preeminent and influential neuroscientists today. Initially, her group worked to complete the wiring diagram of the STG and figure out all of the neurotransmitters at each type of synapse and the additional influences of distinct neuromodulators. With that wiring diagram in hand, she began extensive collaborations with computational and theoretical neuroscientists to build models of the STG network to better understand how its various, nonlinear components could integrate to produce robust gastric rhythms. Through extensive work in electrophysiology (including pioneering the dynamic clamp method) and pharmacology together with theory and modeling work, Eve’s group has demonstrated that the STG network can maintain very similar activity patterns even with very different biophysical configurations – a phenomenon known as ‘degeneracy’. This idea has become increasingly appreciated – due in large part to the work of Eve and her lab – as a key principle in biology, explaining how essential circuit functions (like the rhythmic activity of the STG) can be maintained even as the system’s components undergo plasticity. For instance, in more recent years, Eve’s group has studied how the STG network can maintain stability under varying environmental conditions, such as through the changes in temperature that a New England marine crustacean will naturally experience in its natural habitat. Unexpectedly, this work has led Eve into the field of climate science, studying the consequences of climate change on neural circuit degeneracy and stability. This is just one recent example of how Eve has focused on what she describes as “non-consensus problems” throughout her career, attracting people to her lab who share her imaginative and unconventional interests in and approaches to science. As she put it: “As early as a graduate student, I knew I didn’t want to be doing something that would get done whether I did it or not.”
Eve’s legacy extends beyond her scientific accomplishments and discoveries. When asked what she is most proud of in her career, she recounted her first experience of realizing that a graduate student was ready to graduate. There was a specific moment when one of her very first graduate students came into her office with some new data, and she realized from the way he had done those experiments and was thinking about the scientific question that he had taken full ownership over his project: “At that point, I was learning more from him than he was learning from me.” From then on, she has always looked for those moments in her trainees; though they may take various forms, they always reveal themselves. “It’s a gift to witness that and be part of that…It’s one of the most precious things this business has.” Her sincere passion for this aspect of her job shines through the many trainees who have passed through her lab, many who are themselves now leaders in the field.
Even beyond her impressive scientific and mentoring legacy, Eve is notable for her strong voice in the field. She was President of the Society for Neuroscience in 2008, has served on influential advisory committees (including for the BRAIN Initiative), held key editorial roles, and written incisive opinion pieces on topics ranging from leadership and mentorship to writing and publishing. Yet even Eve had to learn to claim her voice, especially when she was starting her career and was one of only very few women in the field. One significant turning point was when, as a just tenured Associate Professor, she was invited to another institution to give a seminar. Although she felt she had been particularly strong and provocative in her talk, the female faculty member who had invited her told her, “that was a really nice seminar, but you don’t have to be so tentative.” In that moment, she realized, “I had so internalized the [patriarchal] culture that said women shouldn’t have voices, my internal experience was so badly calibrated.” It was a momentous realization for her, and from then on she was determined to reclaim her voice. And indeed she has; her voice resonates through the whole field of neuroscience in countless ways, pushing the community to think unconventionally about scientific problems and inspiring the next generation of scientists to find their own voices.
Find out more about Eve and her lab’s research here.
Listen to Megan’s full interview with Eve on April 30, 2025 below!
