Larry Benowitz's research focuses on restoring nerve function lost as a consequence of stroke or injury. Under normal circumstances, nerve cells in the mature central nervous system (CNS: brain, spinal cord, eye) cannot re-establish their connections after injury, nor can intact cells grow new connections to compensate for those that have been lost. As a result of this, victims of traumatic injury, stroke or neurodegenerative diseases can suffer permanent and often devastating losses in movement, sensation, bodily functions, and thinking. The goals of the Benowitz lab are to discover the basic mechanisms that control the growth of nerve connections and to apply insights from this work to promote regeneration and functional recovery after CNS injury.

• Optic nerve regeneration: research on the molecules that enable the projection neurons of the eye (retinal ganglion cells) to regrow their connections through the optic nerve.


• Spinal cord injury and stroke: methods to enhance the rewiring of brain connections and improve functional outcome after spinal cord injury or stroke.


• Inosine and cell signaling pathways: the small, naturally occurring molecule, inosine, stimulates certain types of nerve cells to extend nerve fibers in cell culture and in vivo. Inosine appears to stimulate a cell signaling pathway that controls the expression of a group of genes required for axon growth.

Larry Benowitz received his PhD from California Institute of Technology, where he completed a fellowship in biology. He subsequently completed fellowships in Psychology and Brain Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and in biological chemistry at Harvard Medical School.

He has been invited to speak at a number of scientific symposia, and was the Plenary speaker, International Symposium on Regeneration, Asilomar, CA in 2001; Keynote speaker, "Neuroscience Day,", Medical College of Ohio in 2002; and Visiting Professor, University of Pennsylvania, in 2003. His research has been written up in the Boston Globe, Harvard Focus, several Children's Hospital publications, and has been reported worldwide on CBS, CNN and the BBC.