Why you should listen
Professor at Stanford and founding director of Stanford Brain Organogenesis, Sergiu P. Pasca has pioneered transformational new technologies to build human brain circuits in the lab -- and gain access to previously inaccessible aspects of brain function and dysfunction.
A physician by training, Pasca developed some of the first "in-a-dish" models of disease by deriving neurons from skin cells taken from patients with genetic brain disorders. His lab developed regionalized neural organoids and pioneered a modular platform known as assembloids to study the wiring of the human brain -- work that was hailed as the "leading edge of stem-cell research" by Nature and recognized with a Breakthrough in Life Sciences Award by Falling Walls in 2020. A professor at Stanford University, he was named a "Visionary in Medicine and Science" by The New York Times and has received numerous awards and accolades, including the Vilcek Award for Creative Biomedical Promise in 2018, the American Philosophical Society's Judson Daland Prize in 2021 and the IBRO-Kemali Neuroscience Award in 2022.
