Rachel Bennett, Ph.D.

Rachel Bennett is an Assistant Professor of Neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School where she leads a research group investigating mechanisms of neurodegeneration in Alzheimer’s disease. She received her doctoral degree in neuroscience from Washington University in St. Louis in 2014. During her graduate studies, she worked with Dr. David Brody to study concussive traumatic brain injury, focusing on the role that inflammation and microglia play in modifying axon degeneration. For her postdoctoral research, she joined the lab of Dr. Bradley Hyman at the MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease, where she applied in vivo imaging methods, including two-photon microscopy, to visualizing neuronal and vascular function in Alzheimer’s disease models. Her work exploring cerebrovascular alterations in the setting of tau pathology earned her recognition as an Outstanding Emerging Scientist by the BrightFocus Foundation in 2018 and a CCAD New Investigator Award in 2019.  Her current K99/R00 and R01-funded studies will continue these investigations into interactions between pathology and vasculature in the brain and extend our understanding of how this impacts neuron loss.