EVE MARDER
Professor, Department of Biology
Brandeis UniversityPHOTOGRAPH BY MIKE LOVETT/BRANDEIS UNIVERSITYEve Marder has her junior-year college roommate to thank for her initial fascination with neuroscience. “She came back from the first day of an abnormal psychology course and said, ‘Eve, you have to take this course! The professor has an English accent, wears a three-piece suit, and has a dueling scar,’” recalls Marder, a professor of biology at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. “Of course, I agreed. What could be more romantic than that?” The course focused on schizophrenia, which at the time, in 1967, was thought to stem from a genetic predisposition coupled with competing sensory inputs or stressors that the brain couldn’t turn off. “The professor, in passing, said that some people think there may be a [cellular] basis for schizophrenia, including deficient inhibition of electrochemical signals in the brain. I thought, ‘What does that mean, inhibition in the brain?’” says Marder. To find out, she read everything she could about the role of inhibitory neurotransmitters—and, in the process, decided she would become a neuroscientist.
Marder began her graduate studies in biology at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) in 1969. “I was a molecular biologist at heart because I was intrigued by molecules and cells rather than the large systems many were studying,” she says. That same year, a new assistant professor, Allen Selverston, joined the department. “He was the only real neurobiologist in the biology department, so I decided to work with him.” In the summer of 1970, Selverston introduced Marder to the lobster stomatogastric ganglion (STG), a then-new and relatively simple model for studying neuronal connectivity that she has studied ever since.
“Every time we were really stuck—not trivially, but stuck on a deep intellectual level—that has driven us to rethink, go sideways, or turn the ...
