Rate My Professor Claire Bedbrook

Claire Bedbrook is a bioengineer and neuroscientist serving as an Interdisciplinary Postdoctoral Scholar at the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute in the Department of Bioengineering at Stanford University. She holds a joint appointment in the laboratories of Professor Karl Deisseroth and Professor Anne Brunet. Bedbrook earned a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 2011 and a Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the California Institute of Technology in 2018, where she worked with Professor Frances Arnold and Professor Viviana Gradinaru. During her doctoral studies, she developed molecular tools for controlling and recording neural activity through machine-learning-based protein engineering.

At Stanford, Bedbrook investigates how the brain regulates longevity, with the goal of identifying genes, molecules, and behaviors that can extend lifespan and enhance health in later life. Her recent research includes a lifelong behavioral screen of African turquoise killifish, which demonstrated that early-life behavior can predict lifespan; this work was published in Science in March 2026 with co-authors including Ravi Nath, Libby Zhang, Scott Linderman, Anne Brunet, and Karl Deisseroth. Bedbrook received the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute Interdisciplinary Postdoctoral Scholar Award in 2020.