Judith S. Eisen

Biosketch

Judith S. Eisen, PhD is a Professor of Biology in the University of Oregon Institute of Neuroscience. She was born in New York City and grew up in Champaign, Illinois. She earned her BS in Botany and MS in Cell and Developmental Biology from Utah State University and her PhD in Neurobiology from Brandeis University. Dr. Eisen was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oregon Institute of Neuroscience before joining the faculty in 1985. She was previously Director of the Institute of Neuroscience and is currently Interim Head of the Department of Biology. Dr. Eisen’s research awards include the International Zebrafish Society George Streisinger Award, the University of Oregon Outstanding Career Award, the Medical Research Foundation of Oregon Discovery Award and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. She has also been a long time advocate for advancing STEM education and received the Thomas F. Herman Award for Excellence in Pedagogy for establishing the University of Oregon Science Literacy Program. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences.

Research Interests

Dr. Eisen helped to establish zebrafish as a model organism in which to study mechanisms underlying vertebrate genetics and development, with a specific focus on the central nervous system and the neural crest, the precursor of the peripheral nervous system. She pioneered studies of zebrafish identified spinal cord neurons, trunk neural crest cells, and neural crest derivatives, including dorsal root ganglia and the enteric nervous system, and developed new techniques to investigate molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying their development. More recently, she developed zebrafish as a model to study mechanisms by which host-associated microbes modulate central nervous system development and function, and to learn how the peripheral nervous system and immune system interact with host-associated microbes during these processes.