2016 Research Award

Michael C. Carroll, Ph.D, Professor Pediatrics, Head of the Graduate Program in Immunology at Harvard Medical School and Program in Cellular and Molecular Medicine at Boston’s Children’s Hospital;

Steven A. McCarroll, Ph.D., Director of Genetics, Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute; and

Beth Stevens, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Neurology, Harvard Medical School and Boston’s Children’s Hospital.

Dr. Carroll received his Ph.D in Immunology from the UT Southwestern Medical School in Dallas, TX under the direction of Dr. J. Donald Capra in 1980; he subsequently trained in the Biochemistry Department at Oxford U (Oxford, UK). Before becoming Professor of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School and Senior Investigator of The Immune Disease Institute, he was an Assistant Professor in Pediatrics and the Department of Biological Chemistry at the Children’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School. As an expert on the biochemistry of the complement system, earlier in his career he was the first person to characterize the C4 genes. His lab created the C4 knockout mouse and a number of the experiments that were done.

Dr. McCarroll is an institute member of the Broad Institute and director of genetics for the Broad’s Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research. He is also assistant professor in Harvard Medical School’s Department of Genetics.  Dr. McCarroll and the scientists in his lab use genetics, molecular biology, and novel approaches for single-cell analysis to reveal the ways in which genomes vary from person to person and the mechanism by which each variation contributes to human disease. He earned his Ph.D. in neuroscience at the University of California (San Francisco) and completed his postdoctoral fellowship in the lab of David Altshuler (formerly of the Broad, Harvard and MIT) studying human genome variation and the genetic basis of common disease.

Dr. Stevens received her Ph.D 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. She is a recipient of the 2008 Smith Family Award of Excellence in Biomedical Research, a 2010 Dana Foundation Award (Brain and Immunoimaging), and a 2010 Edison Medical Foundation New Scholar in Aging Award. In 2015, she was selected for a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. Her research focuses on understanding how glial cells interact with neurons to communicate with one another through synapses. They are a crucial component in protecting against diseases like schizophrenia. She did earlier work on synaptic pruning, in which the brain sheds weak or redundant connections between neurons as it matures.