Dr. Benjamin Barres had a passion for science from a young age. Raised in New Jersey, Dr. Barres succeeded in high school science and went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before attending Dartmouth for medical school. During residency, frustrated by the lack of answers from academia, Dr. Barres went back to school, earning his PhD in neurobiology from Harvard Medical School in 1990. After Harvard, Dr. Barres worked in a lab at the University College London as a postdoc before moving to Stanford’s department of Neurobiology. Dr. Barres served as a professor in the department from 1993 to 2016, serving as department chair from 2008-2016.
Dr. Barres’ research was focused on glial cells, which are nine of every ten cells in the brain, but more specifically his research focused on astrocytes, a class of glial cells. Through extensive work and dedication, Dr. Barres pioneered the idea that glial cells were integral to the wiring of our brains and that these cells may be the cause of neurodegenerative disorders. Dr. Barres was able to develop methods of isolating and purifying these cells so they could be studied. He made these purification methods widely available to promote further research into glial cells, always with the goal of finding the causes of degenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Data from his lab was also freely available to researchers, fitting into his equitable approach to science. Dr. Barres published over 150 peer-reviewed papers over the course of his career and received many awards for his work.
Beyond his research, Dr. Barres was an advocate for equality in science. Using his perspective as a transgender man, he was able to draw from his experience living as a man in science and his experience living as a woman in science prior to his transition to better advocate for equality in academia. He published a powerful rejoinder to comments made by then president of Harvard Larry Summers that the disparity between the number of men and women in professorships was based on bias, not lack of aptitude as Summers suggested. Dr. Barres’ advocacy permeated his career; his presentations would routinely contain an interlude on gender equality in the middle of his speech to ensure he had a captive audience. Towards the end of his career, he advocated for more extensive protections against sexual harassment, noting the increased impact it had on junior female scientists. His advocacy also happened behind the scenes: contacting organizers to encourage greater diversity on panels at conferences, pushing funding agencies and search committees to expand their members beyond white men, and mentoring as many junior scientists and lab members as he could.
Dr. Barres passed in 2017, but his legacy lives on through his breakthrough research, the numerous mentees he trained, and his advocacy for greater equality in the sciences.
Author: Matthew Klaes