February 26 @ 11:00 am – 12:00 pm
Seminar held in person only.
Dr. Ashleigh Schaffer
Associate Professor, Department of Molecular and Medical Genetics
Oregon Health & Science University
“Leveraging Human Stem Cell Models to Reveal Hidden Therapeutic Opportunities in Neurodevelopment”
Neurodevelopment relies on tightly coordinated cellular processes that govern how proteins are organized, transported, and deployed as neural cells differentiate and mature. In this seminar, I will discuss how disruptions to these processes during early development lead to broad structural and functional consequences in human neural models. I will then describe how these developmental insights motivated the use of human stem cell systems as discovery platforms, enabling the identification of existing drugs that can restore key aspects of cellular organization and neural function. Together, this work illustrates how studying fundamental developmental pathways in human models can reveal unexpected opportunities for therapeutic intervention.