Professor Claude Brodski is the head of the Molecular and Translational Neuroscience Laboratory at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU). He obtained his MD degree from the Technical University of Munich. As a doctoral student at the Max-Planck Institute for Neurobiology and a postdoctoral fellow at the Max-Planck Institute for Psychiatry, he studied the molecular mechanisms by which neurotrophic factors control neuronal development and survival. His lab at BGU contributed significantly to the discovery that neurotrophic factors called bone morphogenetic proteins 5/7 (BMP5/7) promote the development of dopamine-producing neurons in vivo and in human pluripotent stem cells. Moreover, his lab discovered that BMP5/7 proteins protect dopamine-producing neurons against toxicity induced by alpha-synuclein build up in a preclinical model of Parkinson’s disease (PD).