2013 CART grant recipient Beth Stevens, Ph.D. has been named a 2015 MacArthur Fellow by the MacArthur Foundation. Dr. Stevens is an Assistant Professor of Neurology, F. M. Kirby Neurobiology Center, Boston Children’s Hospital.
The MacArthur Fellows Program awards unrestricted $625,000 fellowships to talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction.
Beth Stevens researches the “pruning” function of microglial cells or removal of synaptic cells during brain development . Stevens’s discoveries indicate that adult neural circuitry is determined not only by the nerve cells but also by the brain’s immune cells. Her work suggests that adult diseases caused by deficient neural architecture (such as autism and schizophrenia) or states of neurodegeneration (such as Alzheimer’s or Huntington’s disease) may be the result of impaired microglial function and abnormal activation of this pruning pathway.
Read Beth Stevens MacArthur Fellow profile here https://www.macfound.org/fellows/946/