Ben Barres
| Ben A. Barres | |
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| Born | 1955 (age 61–62) West Orange, New Jersey, US |
| Residence | California |
| Citizenship | US |
| Nationality | US |
| Fields | Neurobiology |
| Institutions | Stanford University |
| Alma mater |
M.I.T. (BS) Dartmouth College (MD) Harvard Medical School (PhD) |
| Doctoral advisor | David Corey |
| Known for |
Neuroscience Gender discrimination |
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Website med |
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Ben A. Barres (born Barbara Barres, in 1955) is an American neurobiologist at Stanford University. His research focuses on the interaction between neurons and glial cells in the nervous system. Since 2008, he has been Chair of the Neurobiology Department at Stanford University School of Medicine. He transitioned to male in 1997, and became the first openly transgender scientist in the US National Academy of Sciences in 2013.
Barres was born in West Orange, New Jersey. His father was a salesman. Attending a West Orange school, he excelled in mathematics and science and was impressed by his eighth-grade teacher Jeffrey Davis. He obtained a BS degree in biology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a medical degree (MD) from Dartmouth Medical School, neurology residency training at Weill Cornell, and a doctorate (PhD) in neurobiology from Harvard University. He did his postdoctoral training at University College London under Martin Raff. In 1993 he joined the faculty of neurobiology at the Stanford School of Medicine. In 1997, he changed sex from female to male and has published on sexism in the sciences. In 2008 he was appointed to the Chair of Neurobiology.
He studies the development and function of glial cells in the mammalian central nervous system. He has pioneered novel methods to culture and purify glial cells from rodents' optic nerves (oligodendrocytes and astrocytes) and the neurons they interact with (retinal ganglion cells). His research targets the roles of glia normally, and in the failure of the central nervous system (CNS) to regenerate and the role of glia in Alzheimer's and other neurodegenertaive diseases.
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