Dr. Rebecca Shafee is a Research Fellow in the Section on Developmental Neurogenomics at the NIMH, where her research focuses on understanding the biological basis of sex-differences in brain structure and function using neuroimaging and statistical genetics techniques.

Dr. Shafee’s academic training is in physics - she received her B.S. from Caltech and Ph.D. from Harvard University. Her Ph.D. thesis tackled the problem of estimating how fast black holes spin. At the postdoctoral level she transitioned to research in neuroscience as a recipient of the Swartz Fellowship at the Center for Brain Science at Harvard University. At the CBS and later at the Harvard Medical School and the Broad Institute she received postdoctoral training in neuroimaging and statistical genetics leading projects which utilized large complex datasets (for example, UK Biobank, B-SNIP) and cutting-edge computational techniques to investigate the genetic basis of brain structure and function in health as well as in disease.