Dr. Marta Stevanovic graduated magna cum laude with High Honors from Harvard College with her AB in Anthropology. As an undergraduate, she was awarded a Harvard College Research Program grant to conduct stable isotope research in the Harvard Biogeochemistry Laboratory. She also studied transplantation biology at the Massachusetts General Hospital and spent one summer as a co-investigator in an ocular melanoma study at the University of Southern California. During her junior year she was a John Harvard Scholar, an honor designated to the top 5% of the graduating class at Harvard College based on GPA. She was also inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa honor society and received the Joseph Garrison Parker Prize, which is awarded to one undergraduate annually who has an unusual breadth of interests outside the specifically premedical courses. During her time at Harvard, she was a member of the Radcliffe Choral Society and MIHNUET, a music service group that promotes healing through music in hospitals and nursing homes.

She earned her MD from Emory University where she held a Robert W. Woodruff Fellowship, a merit-based full tuition and stipend scholarship for all four years of medical school. At Emory, she was inducted into the Alpha Omega Alpha medical honor society. She took two years away from medical school to pursue full-time basic science research and was supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Foundation Fighting Blindness during this time. During her first research year, she investigated the use of stem cells to treat age-related macular degeneration at the University of Southern California and University of California Santa Barbara under the mentorship of Dr. Mark Humayun and Dr. Dennis Clegg. During her second research year, she obtained a Master of Science by Research degree at the University of Oxford, Merton College, in the Department of Physiology, Anatomy, and Genetics where she investigated CRISPR/Cas gene editing to treat inherited retinal disease under the mentorship of Dr. Robert MacLaren.

Her work has been published in journals such as The CRISPR Journal, Current Gene Therapy, JAMA Ophthalmology, Brachytherapy, and Acta Ophthalmologica. She has published book chapters in “Macular Surgery, Current Trends and Controversies” and “Cell-Based Therapy for Degenerative Retinal Disease.” She has presented her work internationally at conferences such as the American Society for Clinical Investigation, Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology, Oxford Ophthalmological Congress, and FLORetina.