Sergiu Pasca

Sergiu P. Pasca is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and the Bonnie Uytengsu and Family founding Director of Stanford Brain Organogenesis. He is also a NYSCF Robertson Investigator and a CZI Ben Barres Investigator.
A physician by training, Dr Pasca is interested in understanding the rules governing human brain assembly and the mechanisms of neuropsychiatric disease. Dr Pasca developed some of the initial in-a-dish models of disease by deriving neurons from skin cells taken from patients with genetic neurodevelopmental disorders. His laboratory introduced the use of instructive signals for reproducibly deriving from stem cells self-organizing 3D cellular ensembles named brain region-specific spheroids or organoids. He also pioneered a modular system to study human neural circuits in functional preparations known as assembloids, which were recognized with a Breakthrough in Life Sciences Award by Falling Walls (2020) and were named a 2021 Method to Watch by Nature Methods. His laboratory has systematically applied these advanced cellular models to gain novel insights into human physiology, evolution and brain disease mechanisms, and supported researchers around the world in learning and implementing these techniques.
Dr Pasca was named a Visionary in Medicine and Science by the New York Times. He is the recipient of the 2018 Vilcek Award for Creative Biomedical Promise, the National Institute of Mental Health BRAINS Award (2015), the A.E. Bennett Award in Biological Psychiatry (2018), the Folch-Pi Neurochemistry Award (2017), the Günter Blobel Award for Cell Biology (2018), the Daniel E. Efron Award in Neuropsychopharmacology (2018), the International Basic Science Schizophrenia Prize (2021), the J. Altman Award in Developmental Neuroscience (2021) and the Judson Daland Award from the American Philosophical Society (2021).