Francine M. Benes

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Francine M. Benes (born May 8, 1946) is an American neuroscientist and psychiatrist whose work has helped shape modern psychiatry, especially in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. She grew up in New York City and earned a BA from St. John’s University in 1967. She then studied at Yale University, earning an MD in 1978 and a PhD in Cellular Biology in 1982.

Early in her career, Benes studied neural development in animals and showed that changes in neuronal connections can happen quickly after certain changes in connectivity. After attending a Winter Brain Research Conference in the 1970s, she shifted her focus to human brain disorders and completed a psychiatry residency at McLean Hospital. She investigated brain structure differences in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, supporting the idea that these conditions may involve disrupted neural connections rather than just brain cell loss.

Benes directed the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center from 1997 to 2014, expanding it into the NeuroBioBank, a national resource for postmortem brain samples used by researchers worldwide. She has published more than 140 papers and has worked with the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation and Creedmoor Psychiatric Center. Her awards include the Lieber Prize (2002), the William S. Silen Lifetime Achievement in Mentoring Award (2005), and the Society of Biological Psychiatry Gold Medal Award (2015). She is a professor emeritus at Harvard Medical School.