Principal Investigators

Beth Stevens

Principal Investigator for the Conte Center

Associate Professor of Neurology

Beth Stevens received her PhD in Neuroscience in 2003 from the University of Maryland, College Park and completed her postdoctoral fellowship at the Stanford University School of Medicine in 2008 in the lab of Ben Barres where she studied the roles of glia and complement system in synaptic refinement. She is an institute member of the Broad Institute, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, and a research associate in neurobiology at Boston Children’s Hospital.

Her research seeks to understand the mechanisms that regulate the disappearance of synapses — junctions where nerves communicate with each other — by focusing on how immune-related molecules mediate this process. Her most recent work seeks to uncover how microglial cells, the immune cells of the central nervous system, help sculpt developing neural circuits and how microglia dysfunction may contribute to t neurodevelopmental and neuropsychiatric disorders.