Ben Barres (Stanford University School of Medicine)A few years after neuroscientist Ben Barres became a tenured professor at Stanford, he overheard a colleague talking about one of his classes: “Ben Barres gave a great seminar today, but then his work is much better than his sister’s.”But Barres had no sister in the field. That experience gave Barres keen insight into the inequalities that pervaded science — and a determination to correct them. “His passion was for science,” Andrew Huberman, an associate professor of neurobiology at Stanford who spent five years as Barres's advisee, said in Barres's Stanford obituary. And when a math professor said Barres's boyfriend must have helped in Barres's solving a problem that stumped the other male classmates. “I once invited Ben Barres to speak to young LGBT students.

Source: Washington Post December 28, 2017 21:17 UTC