I am a professor in the Departments of Pathology and Chemical and Systems Biology and program lead at the Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine at Stanford University. I graduated with an MD-PhD from the Technical University of Munich where I trained in developmental genetics in the lab of Rudi Balling. After completing my residency in neuropathology at the University of Bonn, I then became a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Rudolf Jaenisch at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research/MIT in Cambridge, Mass.

I received an NIH Pathway to Independence Award, the Cozzarelli Prize for Outstanding Scientific Excellence from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the Outstanding Investigator Award from the International Society for Stem Cell Research and the New York Stem Cell Foundation Robertson Stem Cell Prize. More recently, I was awarded the Ogawa-Yamanaka Stem Cell Prize presented by the Gladstone Institutes and have been named a HHMI Faculty Scholar.

My lab applies cellular reprogramming and genetic engineering to create next generation human cell models of the brain and develops cell-based therapies for currently intractable neurological diseases. We showed that skin cells can be directly reprogrammed to functional neuronal cells, which I termed induced neuronal (iN) cells. The lab is now working on identifying the molecular mechanisms underlying induced lineage fate changes, the phenotypic consequences of disease-causing mutations in human neurons and other neural lineages as well as the development of novel therapeutic gene targeting and cell transplantation-based strategies for a variety of brain diseases, including brain cancer and neurodegeneration.