Francine M. Benes papers

Francine Mary Benes (1946-), B.S., 1967, St. John's University, New York City, New York; M.S., 1969, Adelphi University, Garden City, New York; M. Phil, 1971, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut; Ph.D., 1972, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut; M.D., 1978, Yale School of Medicine, is the William P. and Henry B. Test Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts; former Director of the Program for Structural and Molecular Neuroscience at McLean Hospital, Belmont, Massachusetts; and Director Emeritus of the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center.

Born in Queens, New York, on May 8, 1946, Francine Benes received her bachelor's degree from St. John's University, New York City, in 1967 and her M.S. from Adelphi University on Long Island, New York, in 1969. She was a teaching assistant at Adelphi during her last year at the university while also holding a position as research assistant at the Institute of Neurosciences at Creedmore Hospital in Queens, New York. In 1972, she completed a PhD in Cell Biology at Yale School of Medicine.

Between 1972 and 1975, she received post-doctoral training at the City of Hope National Medical Center in California where she used single cell neurochemistry techniques to study GABA neurons. Between 1973 and 1975, Benes held a post-doctoral position on the Public Health Service in Neurobiology at Yale Medical School in New Haven, Connecticut. In 1974, Benes took a position as director of the neuroanatomy laboratory course at Yale Medical School, a job she held until 1977 when she was promoted to a lectureship in neuroanatomy. In 1975, Benes began medical school at Yale. During 1978, Benes was a resident in internal medicine at Waterbury Hospital in New Haven, an affiliate of Yale's medical school.

Benes received her M.D. in 1978 and began a residency as a clinical fellow at McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical School. After completing her residency in 1982, Benes stayed on at McLean and the Harvard Brain Tissue Research Center as a researcher, continuing work on projects she had begun in the late 1970s. In 1996, Benes assumed the directorship of the Harvard Brain Tissue Research Center after the retirement of founding director Edward Bird.

During her early research career in the 1970s and 1980s, Benes focused on structural correlates to psychiatric conditions, including how the central nervous system is affected by dopamine and serotonin, the effects of the medication haloperidol (commonly known as Haldol), and microscopic and CT studies of the brain tissue of those affected by psychiatric illnesses such as bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. Changes visible via CT examination might include atrophy of cortical brain tissue or the enlargment of ventricular areas.

Benes' work developed by using the post-mortem brains of patients with a clinical diagnosis of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, with special focus on determining the role of GABA cells in the pathophysiology of neurodegenerative disorders. GABA is manufactured in the brain from glutamate and generally acts as a neurotransmitter inhibiting nerve transmissions. GABA thus interacts with a wide variety of other neurotransmitters, including serotonin and dopamine, both of which have been implicated in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Benes' later research employs microarray-based gene expression profiling (GEP) to explore the genetic causes for GABA cell dysfunction and to determine how molecular mechanisms differ in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

Benes is the author of multiple publications, including chapters in standard textbooks on psychopathology and neurology, and has received numerous awards over the course of her career including the Anne M. Cataldo Excellence in Mentoring Award (2012), the Kempf Fund Award in Psychobiological Psychiatry from the American Psychiatry Association (2006), the William Silen Lifetime Achievement in Mentoring from Harvard Medicine School (2005), and the Gold Medal Award for Lifetime Achievement in Research, Society for Biological Psychiatry. She has held memberships in the World Psychiatric Organization, the Society for Neuroscience, the Society for Biological Psychiatry, and the National Association for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression.