The Speakers

Chris A. Walsh completed his MD/PhD at The University of Chicago with Ray Guillery. After neurology residency at Massachusetts General Hospital and postdoctoral training in the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School with Constance Cepko, he became Assistant Professor at Beth Israel-Deaconess Medical Center in 1993, and moved to Boston Children’s Hospital in 2006, where he is Chief of the Division of Genetics and Genomics. He has been an HHMI Investigator since 2002.

His lab focuses on the development of human cerebral cortex, and analysis of genetic conditions that result in epilepsy, intellectual disability, autism spectrum disorders, and other conditions. His lab has identified more than three dozen neurological disease genes. Recent work focuses on clonal somatic mutations—present in some cells but not all cells--as contributors to human epilepsy, autism, schizophrenia, and degeneration. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences. He received the UNC-Perl Award in 2018, and shared the Gruber Prize in 2021 and the Kavli Prize in 2022.

Dr. Bateup graduated from The Rockefeller University where she completed her PhD thesis with Dr. Paul Greengard. For her doctoral work she generated genetic mouse models to determine the cell type-specific consequences of dopamine signaling on striatal-dependent behaviors. She then joined Dr. Bernardo Sabatini’s lab as a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School to study how alterations in mTOR signaling affect synaptic function and excitatory/inhibitory balance in the hippocampus. In 2013, Dr. Bateup started her lab at the University of California, Berkeley in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology and Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute. In 2019 Dr. Bateup was named a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator and in 2020 Dr. Bateup was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure. Her research centers on understanding the cellular and molecular basis of neuropsychiatric disorders, with an emphasis on neurodevelopmental disorders. As a faculty member she has been the recipient of several awards including the Regents' Junior Faculty Fellowship, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship, Hellman Family Faculty Fund Award, NARSAD Young Investigator Award, Janett Rosenberg Trubatch Career Development Award, C.J. Herrick Award in Neuroanatomy, and Rose Hills Innovator Award. 

Geneticist and systems neuroscientist interested in bridging knowledge from genes to circuits and behavior. Special focus on the role of inhibition in cortical circuits across postnatal development.

Kay M. Tye received her bachelor’s degree in Brain and Cognitive Sciences from MIT in 2003 and earned her Ph.D. in 2008 at UCSF with Patricia Janak.  Her thesis work was supported by the National Science Foundation and recognized with the Lindsley Prize in Behavioral Neuroscience as well as the Weintraub Award in Biosciences.  She completed her postdoctoral training with Karl Deisseroth at Stanford University in 2011, with support from an NRSA from NIMH.  She became an Assistant Professor at MIT in 2012, and has since been recognized with the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, Technology Review’s Top 35 Innovators under 35, and has been named a Whitehall, Klingenstein and Sloan Foundation Fellow. In 2019 Kay became Professor in the Systems Neurobiology Laboratory and Wylie Vale Chair at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.  In 2021, Kay became a Howard Hughes Medical Investigator.

Lu Chen is a Professor in the Department of Neurosurgery and the Wu Tsai Neuroscience Institute at Stanford University School of Medicine. Born and raised in China, she received her bachelor’s degree in Biology from the University of Science and Technology of China. After obtaining her PhD in Neuroscience at the University of Southern California and a brief postdoctoral training at the University of California, San Francisco, she joined the faculty in the Dept. Molecular and Cell Biology and the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley in 2003. She moved to Stanford University School of Medicine in 2011. In her own lab, she and her research team focus on understanding how our ability to learn and to remember is supported by the changes of neural circuits in specific regions of the brain, and how our past experiences (both good and bad) as well as genetic mutations seen in psychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders impact this ability. In addition, she applies principal mechanisms learned from her work in the brain to explore fundamental mechanisms in the spinal cord underlying injury/neuropathy-induced chronic pain.  Through her basic and translation research, she hopes to find novel treatments for neuropsychiatric disorders (such as Fragile-X syndrome) and neuropathic pain. 

Professor Sergiu Pasca’s laboratory at Stanford University seeks to understand the rules that govern the assembly of the human brain and the molecular mechanisms that lead to neuropsychiatric disease. To achieve this, the laboratory has pioneered and applied neural organoid and assembloid technologies to make discoveries in fundamental and clinical neuroscience.