The study of Rett syndrome, a rare neurological disorder, became deeply personal to Devorah Kranz after she became pregnant in the last year of her PhD in Harvard’s Program in Neuroscience.
Her research — which involved collecting and working with data about children with the syndrome, who often do not speak and who have issues with movement and autonomic function — required her to meet families participating in the study.
Rett syndrome usually arises spontaneously, rather than being passed down from a parent, so families often don’t know it will occur.
“Life ends up looking very different from what their parents thought it would look like,” Kranz said. “Running that study, interacting with those children and their families, and seeing what they had gone through while I was pregnant myself was — I don’t even know the word for it. But it was an experience.”
Pregnancy and delivery went well for Kranz, who gave birth to a healthy baby girl in October 2025, only days after she defended her PhD dissertation at the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
Today, she brings her concern for child health, along with creativity and big-picture thinking developed during her upbringing in a Hasidic Jewish community, to the study of the brain as a Harvard Medical School research fellow in neurology at Boston Children’s Hospital. There, her investigations into sensory processing are also deepening scientists’ understanding of autism.
Finding her footing
Kranz’s work and life path are great departures from her upbringing in an ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jewish community that stressed religious education and provided relatively little exposure to science.
Kranz grew up in Virginia in a Chabad house, a center or outpost that involves community building, she said. Her father is a rabbi, and her mother ran a Jewish preschool.
“My life was full of holiday-related activities, conversations with people, programs, and big Friday night dinners for Shabbat,” she said.
Kranz said she started at “a fairly regular” Jewish day school, but when she and her older brothers reached high school age, they were sent away for an education more closely aligned with the values of Chabad and Hasidic Judaism.
Kranz focused on Hasidic thought, philosophy, theology, and the teachings of the Hebrew scriptures. The education was intellectually rigorous but provided limited exposure to math and science.
After graduation, Kranz attended seminary.
“That was what everybody did after high school,” she said.
Women do not serve as rabbis in the Hasidic tradition, so Kranz’s seminary education was preparation for Hasidic life as a woman and Chabad outreach — a path she was unsure she wanted to pursue. Before finishing her first year — and with mixed reactions from her family and her peers — she decided to apply to college instead and attended Brandeis University.
Although it’s a nonsectarian school, Brandeis is renowned for its high proportion of Jewish students and strong Jewish life on campus. For Kranz, though, it was a culture shock.
“It was not Hasidic,” she said. “It was a different kind of Jewish environment than I had ever experienced, and that was difficult. I didn’t really know what to make of anyone, and no one really knew what to make of me. I struggled to find a sense of belonging and to find my footing there.”
A big game of catch-up
Kranz initially majored in philosophy, a subject for which her religious education had prepared her well. Still, she hungered for a different kind of study, so she enrolled in a range of introductory science courses.
Because there were basic scientific concepts that she simply did not understand, she felt her classmates were speaking a language she did not know. She said that for a long time it was a big game of catch-up.
“But it was also magical, learning everything from the ground up and being exposed to science and scientific ways of thinking,” she added.
Challenged by the work in her Principles of Neuroscience class, Kranz reached out to course leader Eve Marder. The connection was a turning point. Marder offered Kranz a position in her lab, became her mentor, and supervised her honors thesis.
Kranz credits Marder with teaching her how to think about science. Their experiments included dissecting the nerves of crabs, using electrodes to measure cell response, and perturbing the system with variables like temperature and neuromodulation and watching what happened in real time.
“I thought, ‘I am never going to do anything other than this,’” she said.
That work led to a position in the lab of Michael Long at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, where Kranz studied the motor pathways involved in the singing behavior of zebra finches. Long served as another critical mentor, teaching Kranz in vivo experimental techniques and rigorous scientific thinking. With his encouragement, she applied to PhD programs, eventually enrolling at Harvard Griffin GSAS.
“Long basically said, ‘You are obviously good at this. You are obviously going to do a PhD.’ And I was like, ‘A PhD?’ I had never really imagined that,” Kranz said.
By that point, Kranz realized she had found a niche where she could probe questions, generate new knowledge, ask things about the brain, and do experiments to find answers.
“And people would fund this. There were labs that did this. It was amazing to me,” she said.
Found in translation
At HMS and Boston Children’s, Kranz began probing how neural circuits give rise to behavior in mice. Many key features of Rett syndrome — which is most commonly caused by a mutation in the MECP2 gene — can be modeled in these animals. She then wanted to move into human studies.
To do so, she brought together different advisors across basic and translational neuroscience and human-subjects research. Among them were her PhD co-advisors Michela Fagiolini, HMS associate professor of neurology, part-time, at Boston Children’s, and Charles Nelson, HMS professor of pediatrics at Boston Children’s, as well as mentor April Levin, HMS associate professor of neurology at Boston Children’s.
Focusing on electroencephalography (EEG)-based biomarkers, Kranz searched for clues about the underlying neurobiology of sensory-processing differences that could be observed behaviorally.
“The brain has to be exquisitely coordinated when it responds to a stimulus,” she explained. “Sometimes, you can see that a stimulus has an outsized effect — for example, certain sounds may be overwhelming, while another stimulus, maybe even hearing one’s own name, may produce very little response.”
In some cases, Kranz noted, individuals can show both heightened and diminished responses to different sensory stimuli or even to the same type of stimulus at different times.
Although the response type may be related to salience, some of it may also have to do with differences in how the brain balances excitation and inhibition, she said. That balance may in turn reflect differences in how consistently the brain processes sensory input and coordinates its responses across regions and over time.
Kranz’s research identified mechanisms that can be tested in animal models and may one day serve as biomarkers of underlying circuit dysfunction. Among them are a specialized class of neurons called vasoactive intestinal peptide interneurons.
Fagiolini said that her former student’s work helped demonstrate that altered temporal coordination of neural activity — not simply weaker brain responses — may underlie sensory abnormalities in Rett syndrome.
“She revealed previously hidden features of brain dynamics that may serve as scalable biomarkers for clinical trials and precision therapeutics,” said Fagiolini.
Crossing boundaries in neuroscience research
Many individuals with Rett syndrome have symptoms that overlap with autism and meet criteria for autism spectrum disorder. Because primary autism is genetically complex and heterogeneous, with contributions from many genes, it can be challenging for scientists to study. Studying Rett syndrome can help illuminate the underlying neurobiology and potentially identify subgroups within the autism spectrum.
Nelson says Kranz’s discovery of sensory sensitivities in the auditory and visual domains indeed has important implications for understanding autism.
“Many children with Rett look as though they are autistic,” Nelson said. “Devorah’s work unpacks a defining feature of autism.”
With this work, Kranz also hopes to bridge gaps between laboratory and clinical research, moving back and forth between neurobiological studies in animal models, functional magnetic resonance imaging and cognitive neuroscience in humans, and computational and mathematical modeling.
Combining large-scale human brain measurements with biophysically grounded models of cells and circuits has been one of Kranz’s most important contributions to the field, said Fagiolini.
“Her work exemplifies truly bidirectional translational neuroscience,” Fagiolini said. This iterative approach is exactly what the field needs to accelerate therapeutic development.”
Mystery and wonder
Although her upbringing and schooling may have created a steeper learning curve for Kranz than for many other aspiring scientists, over time, she realized that the perspective she brought to the lab could also be an asset.
“The tradition I grew up in is mystical,” she said. “There’s a lot of thinking about big systems, a lot of wrestling with ideas and trying to make sense of how things fit together.”
Today, Kranz is focused on postdoctoral projects, publishing research, and enjoying the joys of parenthood — perhaps the greatest of which is seeing the look of pure wonder in her daughter’s eyes, she said. It’s how Kranz, who remains involved in her religious tradition and close to her family of origin, feels about science.
One time, when she was a teaching fellow in the Harvard undergraduate Neuroscience of Behavior course, she got excited explaining a concept to her students.
“I don’t know if you all realize this, but this is quite incredible!” she exclaimed.
Kranz said that as she watches her daughter develop, she feels as if she’s learning about neuroscience all over again.
“I’m watching her brain observe the world, make connections, and develop skills in real time,” she said. “And I can imagine one day talking about it all with her and feeling that wonder bubbling up again.”
Adapted from a Harvard Griffin GSAS news story.
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