As a first-generation, African-American, female neuroscientist, Eve DeRosa is atypical along many dimensions. Her research also crosses typical boundaries using a cross-species approach, in rats and humans, to examine how brains and cognitive faculties change across the lifespan.
At Vassar College, Eve prepared for a career in modern dance and medicine. After graduation, she worked in a surgical metabolism research lab at Harvard University School of Medicine, where she fell in love with research. For her Ph.D., she trained in animal neuroscience in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, and then trained in human neuroscience as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine. After a decade as faculty at the University of Toronto – St. George, Eve was recruited to Cornell. She was named a Rebecca Q. and James C. Morgan Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow and re-built her rat and human labs through an Empire Innovation award from SUNY. She supports her research primarily through the National Institutes of Health (NIH). In Canada, her research was continuously supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.
Eve contributed to service for the Department of Human Development (HD), the College of Human Ecology (CHE), and the University: CHE Dean’s Fellow for Racial and Social Justice (current), Director of Undergraduate Studies (3 years), Executive Committee member (7 years), Chaired the Graduate Admissions Committee (3 years), CHE Education Policy Committee member (3 years), CHE Dean’s Search Committee member and multiple faculty search committees, and a standing NIH study section member (6 years). In 2019, Eve received the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Faculty Service.
For community outreach, Eve’s lab has developed a program, seeded by funds from Engaged Cornell, to have undergraduates teach neuroscience to elementary school children in the city of Syracuse. This program supports her passion for how scholarship needs diversity in both ideas and the people who wish to pursue them.
