معرفی
Flora Vaccarino is the Harris Professor at the Child Study Center and Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at Yale University. She received her MD from the University of Padova and has held roles including Research Fellow at NIH and Yale School of Medicine. Her research focuses on neural stem cell biology, human brain development, and somatic mosaicism. Vaccarino pioneered human brain organoid generation from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) to study neurodevelopmental disorders like autism and Tourette syndrome. She leads the Program in Neurodevelopment and Regeneration and is a founding member of the Brain Somatic Mosaicism Network (BSMN).
Her work spansin vivo studies of FGF signaling in rodents, human stem cell differentiation mechanisms, and lineage tracing to map early embryonic development. Key contributions include identifying interneuron deficits in Tourette’s and demonstrating FGF’s role in cortical surface expansion. Awards include AAAS Fellowship and the NARSAD Distinguished Investigator Award.
Research interests include somatic mosaicism’s role in neuropsychiatric disorders, organoid-based disease modeling, and translational approaches to neurodevelopmental disorders. Her lab collaborates with computational teams to analyze genomic and transcriptomic data in human tissues and organoids.