Susan E. Fahrbach, neuroanatomy, is Professor of Developmental Neuroscience at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC. She works on development encompassing the whole life span. In the past decade her focus has been on the structural plasticity of the adult honey bee brain.

She is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Comparative Neurology, the leading neuroanatomical journal. Since 1992, she has collaborated with G.E. Robinson on studies of honey bee brain and behavior. Their demonstration in 1993 (Nature 364: 238-240) that forager bees have a larger volume of neuropil associated with the mushroom bodies than do hive bees represented the first application of modern stereological techniques to the insect brain. The techniques pioneered by Fahrbach are now widely used to study neuroplasticity in insect brains.

Fahrbach joined the Wake Forest University faculty as Reynolds Professor of Developmental Neuroscience in 2004. She holds honors as an AAAS Fellow and a University Scholar of the University of Illinois, where she taught for 19 years before assuming her position at Wake Forest. She has been deeply involved in undergraduate education. In addition to personally mentoring 41 undergraduate researchers at UIUC, she served as PI of an NSF REU Site on Honey Bee Brains and Behavior, and was PI on an NSF Undergraduate Mentoring in Environmental Biology Program. From 1998 to 2004, she served as the Director of the Illinois' HHMI-sponsored program for undergraduate education in biology, in which role she directed both an undergraduate research program and leads three science outreach programs (BOAST, for K-5 students; Prairie Flowers, for middle school science teachers; and BEOP, a biotechnology program for high school teachers).