Dr. Marder is known for her pioneering work on small neuronal networks which her team has interrogated via a combination of complementary experimental and theoretical techniques.

Marder has published 190 original research papers in refereed journals, and 179 review articles, book chapters, and opinion pieces.

Marder has received numerous awards for her pioneering work in the field including the National Medal of Science in 2023 and the Kavli Prize in 2016.

Marder has shared that a pivotal turning point in her scientific self-development was writing a paper on schizophrenia during an abnormal psychology class during her junior year.

Her subsequent library studies on inhibition in neural signaling solidified her career goals to become a neuroscientist and launched her on what would become her lifelong academic path.

It was during her time as a graduate student at UCSD that Marder would be introduced to the specific neural network, the lobster stomatogastric-ganglion system, that would prove pivotal for the rest of her academic career.

She pioneered work on plasticity and homeostasis, revealing more about how the brain can change dramatically during learning and development yet remain structurally stable.

[4] This led her to study the effects of temperature and other global perturbations on neural circuits through the context of climate change and the crustacean STNS.

Notably, in the 1990s with Larry Abbott, she helped develop the dynamic clamp method, which enables an experimenter to induce mathematically modeled conductances into living neurons to view the output of theoretical circuits.