Carla Shatz has blazed a trail of firsts for women in neuroscience. Along the way, she has mentored a number of female scientists. She thinks that most girls are interested in science, but many simply lose interest under pressure from society.

After a chemistry degree from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, she received a Marshall Fellowship to University College London and spent the next two years learning about physiology and biological systems.

Shatz returned to the United States to receive the first doctorate in neurobiology from Harvard — in part because she thought the move would offer broader opportunities. Being mentored by David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel, who were conducting Nobel-prizewinning science detailing how the brain is wired, made it an even smarter move.

“I got interested in this incredibly beautiful computational machine, and I wanted to see how the heck it was wired up during development,” she says.

For her first job, Shatz's strategy was to go to the place that really wanted her. When Stanford University came calling, Shatz accepted. There, she became the first female basic scientist to be granted tenure at the medical school.

After 13 years at Stanford, she spent the next eight at the University of California, Berkeley, where she tried to establish an interdisciplinary neuroscience institute. Frustrated by a lack of administrative support, Shatz accepted an offer to be the first woman to chair Harvard's neurobiology department. “I couldn't turn it down because I felt I was on a mission to represent women at the highest levels of the university,” she says. But she says the competition for space and resources were difficult to handle.

Having always hoped to return to Stanford, Shatz will soon be leading its BioX programme, which merges science, medicine and technology. Stanford neurobiologist William Newsome describes Shatz as an ideal leader for BioX because she has used a host of approaches — from anatomy to molecular biology to physiology — to show that brain development is not solely under genetic control. Shatz says that she sees her biggest challenge as integrating BioX with other departments.

Former colleagues eagerly await her return. “BioX already has fruit, but Carla will grow that tree and expand its influence,” says Susan McConnell, a former graduate student of Shatz, adding that one of her many exceptional talents is facilitating long-lasting communities.