If “billions and billions” of celestial bodies seem mind-boggling, then consider the human brain—a mere three pounds of matter populated by a trillion cells, among them one hundred billion neurons buzzing with at least a million billion connections.

“The brain is our last frontier,” notes Tallie Z. Baram, M.D., Ph.D. ’80. “It drives who we are and what we are.”

Baram, a noted brain researcher, is professor of pediatrics, anatomy, neurobiology, and neurology in the University of California–Irvine School of Medicine and scientific director of its Comprehensive Epilepsy Program. Her long-held interest in this multifaceted organ fueled her doctoral work in neuroendocrinology, the science of how the brain influences hormones, at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, earning her the school’s John F. Kennedy Prize. The reward: postdoctoral work anywhere in the world. Baram, who grew up near Tel Aviv, chose the University of Miami’s Ph.D.-to-M.D. Program, which has since been discontinued.

“I came to Miami with suitcases that weighed more than me,” recalls Baram, the youngest in her class and the only non-American. “The University of Miami program was the only place in the world that allowed me to study medicine rapidly, so I could find the really relevant questions in brain research.”

Baram is fascinated by the way time and experience influence brain structure and function. “The adult brain is a three-dimensional structure,” she explains, “but the developing brain has four dimensions. Brain functions change constantly.”

Early life stress and seizures, in particular, may initiate the reprogramming of gene expression, changes that can trigger a cascade of problems, including cognitive decline and epilepsy. While epilepsy is the most common chronic brain disorder in the young, it is nonetheless “a hidden disease” that is less researched than other disorders. To remedy that, Baram is studying animal models that replicate febrile seizures in infants and children.

When she was honored for her work by the American Epilepsy Society in 2005 at its national meeting in Washington, D.C., her usual aplomb gave way to an unexpected surge of feeling: “I was given a huge, heavy plaque,” she recalls. Standing there, its full weight in her grasp, “I felt an infusion of energy,” she says, “to do more.”

— Leslie Sternlieb