Our Team

We assembled a highly interdisciplinary, campus-wide and uniquely-Stanford research program that combines rigorous, cutting-edge science. At almost all the steps, we are integrating approaches in stem cell biology, molecular and developmental biology, neurosciences, chemistry and engineering, medicine as well as law and ethics. Our ultimate goal is to bring a molecular understanding of neuropsychiatric disorders. 
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Read more about the vision in this Q&A with Sergiu Pasca. 

Members

Sergiu Pasca, MD (PI: Big Idea Grant & Director SBO)
Karl Deisseroth, MD PhD (co-PI:  Big Idea Grant)
Bianxiao Cui, PhD
Hank Greely, PhD
Michael Lin, MD PhD
Sarah Heilshorn, PhD
Zhenan Bao, PhD

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Sergiu P. Pasca, MD
Bonnie Uytengsu and Family Director of Stanford Brain Organogenesis (SBO)

Trained as a physician in Romania, Sergiu Pasca came for postdoctoral training at Stanford in 2009 where he developed some of the initial in vitro models of disease by deriving neurons from skin cells taken from patients with genetic brain disorders. His lab has afterwards introduced the use of instructive signals for reproducibly deriving self-organizing 3D cellular structures known as regionalized neural organoids or spheroids. To gain access to complex cellular interactions in the human brain, his research group also pioneered a modular system to study human neural circuits in preparations named assembloids.
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