Eve MARDER • Doctors honoris causa upon proposal by faculties 2023
On the proposal of the School of Engineering
The Victor and Gwendolyn Beinfield Professor at Brandeis University, Waltham, USA, Eve Marder has devoted most of her career to the study of the behavior of neural assemblies.
Eve Marder is the Victor and Gwendolyn Beinfield Professor at Brandeis University, Waltham, USA. After receiving a B.S. in Biology from Brandeis University in 1969 and a Ph.D. from the University of California at San Diego in 1974, she did postdoctoral research at the University of Oregon (USA) and the École Normale Supérieure in Paris (France), and was subsequently appointed Professor in 1978.
Eve Marder has served as President of the Society for Neuroscience (2008), on the boards of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and the National Academy of Sciences, and on numerous advisory boards for institutions in the United States and abroad. Eve Marder is also a member of the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow of the Biophysical Society, the American Physiological Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She has received the Miriam Salpeter Memorial Award for Women in Neuroscience, the Ralph W. Gerard Award from the Society for Neuroscience, the George A. Miller Award from the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, the Karl Spencer Lashley Award from the American Philosophical Society, honorary doctorates from Bowdoin College, Tel Aviv University, and Princeton University, the Gruber Prize in Neuroscience, the Society for Neuroscience Education Award, the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience, and the National Academy of Sciences Award in Neuroscience.
Professor Marder served on the National Institutes of Health Task Force for the Obama BRAIN Initiative and now serves on its Advisory Board. She has also served on numerous journal editorial boards. She is a former Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Neurophysiology, and was Senior Editor and then Associate Editor of the journal eLife for the first 6 years of its publication.
Over the course of her career, Eve Marder has used experimental, computational, and analytical methods to identify and understand the mechanisms that make neural systems robust to perturbations, yet sensitive and adaptive to changes in their environment. Beyond their impact on the broader neurosciences, Eve Marder's work has inspired the development of new neuromorphic approaches to adaptive control. This rapidly expanding topic has a major potential impact in intelligent and collaborative robotics, in artificial intelligence (machine learning and meta-learning), and in low power intelligent systems.
In particular, Eve Marder's work has helped demonstrate that neural circuits are not strictly "pre-wired", but can be reconfigured by neuromodulatory neurons and neuromodulatory substances to produce a variety of dynamic behaviors. In her research, Eve Marder combines an experimental approach with mathematical modeling. With Professor Larry Abbott, her laboratory has developed the experimental technique of dynamic clamping. Professor Marder has pioneered studies on the homeostatic regulation of neuronal intrinsic membrane properties and has inspired research by many teams around the world on the mechanisms by which the brain remains stable while allowing changes during development and learning. For the past few years, Professor Marder has been studying how the performance of similar neural networks results from different underlying network parameters and analyzing their relevance to the differential resilience of the neuron set. In addition to her original research papers, Eve Marder has published numerous highly influential and widely cited review articles. She has also published more than 20 short essays analyzing the lives of scientists at large, senior and junior. She is a long-time advocate for women and diversity in scientific research. Her life was highlighted in a recent biography by Charlotte Nassim, MIT Press, 2018 Lessons from the Lobster, Eve Marder's Work in Neuroscience.
