Marder was born in Manhattan and raised on the east coast. Although she loved biology from an early age, Marder has shared that she held very diverse academic interests prior to starting her undergraduate degree and in fact entered
Brandeis University as an undergraduate in 1965 with a plan to study politics and become a lawyer. She would instead find herself re-captivated by the world of biology and switched majors to Biology after her freshman year. Marder has shared that a pivotal turning point in her scientific self-development was writing a paper on
schizophrenia during an abnormal psychology class during her junior year. Her subsequent library studies on inhibition in neural signaling solidified her career goals to become a
neuroscientist and launched her on what would become her lifelong academic path. She completed her postdoctoral training at the
University of Oregon in
Eugene and the
École Normale Supérieure in
Paris, France. Marder subsequently began her independent research career at
Brandeis University in 1978 as a faculty member in the department in Biology. In 1990 at
Brandeis, she established one of the first undergraduate neuroscience programs in the United States. During her time as a
PI, she has mentored 29 Ph.D. students and 52 postdoctoral fellows. Her work on the 30
neurons that compose the crustacean stomatogastric ganglion (STG) produced many notable findings. She found that circuits can be modulated by many
neuromodulators. She pioneered work on
plasticity and
homeostasis, revealing more about how the brain can change dramatically during learning and development yet remain structurally stable. Her recent work examining network variability among healthy individuals shows that a variety of network parameters can produce the same behavioral outcome, challenging a long-standing goal in theoretical neuroscience to model 'ideal' neurons and neural circuits. This led her to study the effects of temperature and other global perturbations on neural circuits through the context of climate change and the crustacean STNS. Dr. Marder has contributed to the field of neuroscience with working spanning various topics. One of her first focuses was on the neuromodulatory configuration of neuronal circuits. At the time she began working on motor pattern generation in small circuits, it was believed that neurons had relatively unchangeable properties. This belief led researchers at the time to create connectivity diagrams that would reveal immediately how the circuit functioned. Marder showed that the application of neuromodulatory substances and neurons can alter the properties of circuit components, resulting in a changed circuit output. Other areas of investigation have included models of homeostatic regulation of intrinsic excitability, which notably led to the models of synaptic scaling by
Gina Turrigiano and Sacha Nelson. Her lab also addressed how a circuit may have multiple solutions, and how individuals may resolve the same challenge by adjusting different parameters. They discovered that it is possible to construct models with varying values for the density given ion channels and still produce very similar activity patterns. Notably, in the 1990s with
Larry Abbott, she helped develop the dynamic clamp method, which enables an experimenter to induce mathematically modeled conductances into living neurons to view the output of theoretical circuits. Eve has provided open-source resources like the "1.7 million model neurons" which allows individuals to construct and study how neural circuits function. Presently, Marder's lab has been focused on the effects of climate change and environmental factors on circuit performance. They have investigated the consequences of global perturbations on individual variability, investigating specific factors including temperature, pH, and salinity. Marder's group discovered that there are "cryptic" changes that occur within the circuit as a consequence of the individual animal's temperature history, though these changes are only revealed when the system is exposed to an environmental challenge. Marder has served on numerous editorial boards, and a broad range of review panels and working groups. Her service to the field of neuroscience has been extensive, with notable involvement in the
BRAIN Initiative in 2013. She continues to be on the BRAIN advisory council to this day. A book about Dr. Marder's life and scientific accomplishments was published in 2018, titled "Lessons from the Lobster: Eve Marder's Work in Neuroscience" by Charlotte Nassim. The book discusses Marder's early career, her scientific breakthroughs, impactful collaborations, and lessons she has learned throughout her long and successful career. ==Select publications==