Steve Maren is a professor of neuroscience who studies the neurobiology of emotional learning and memory. Maren is the director of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign .
Maren previously served as University Distinguished Professor and Charles H. Gregory Chair of Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University. He was also affiliated with TAMU’s Institute for Neuroscience. He earned his bachelor’s degree in psychology at Illinois before completing master’s and doctoral degrees in neurobiology at the University of Southern California. Maren started his career at the University of Michigan before joining TAMU in 2012.
Maren has been continuously funded by the NIH since 1995 and brought more than $4.5M in current NIH funding to Illinois. His research program is broadly focused on understanding brain regions and circuits that are important for memory retrieval, including memories for traumatic events. Maren’s work has international reach, and he is among the most highly cited behavioral neuroscientists in the world. He has mentored 37 graduate students and postdocs and serves on the editorial board of Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, Learning & Memory, and Hippocampus. He also has extensive administrative experience. At TAMU, he served as the Dean’s Research Fellow, and Chair of the Council of Principal Investigators, while at Michigan he led the Neuroscience Graduate Program.