Beth Stevens, Ph.D.

Beth Stevens, Ph.D., is an associate professor at Harvard Medical School in the FM Kirby Neurobiology Center at Boston Children’s Hospital and an institute member of the Broad Institute and Stanley Center for Neuropsychiatric Research. Her most recent work seeks to uncover the role that microglial cells play in neurodevelopmental and neuropsychiatric disorders. She and her team recently identified how microglia affect synaptic pruning, the critical developmental process of cutting back on synapses that occurs between early childhood and puberty. Stevens was named a MacArthur Fellow by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in 2015, received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, and the Dana Foundation Award and Ellison Medical Foundation New Scholar in Aging Award. Stevens received her B.S. at Northeastern University, carried out her graduate research at the National Institutes of Health, and received her Ph.D. from University of Maryland. She completed her postdoctoral research at Stanford University with Ben Barres.