Bio:

Paola Arlotta is the Golub Family Professor and Chair of the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology at Harvard University, an associate member of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute of Harvard and M.I.T., and principal faculty member of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. She also holds a Harvard College Professorship for excellence in education. Dr. Arlotta received her Master’s in Biochemistry from the University of Trieste, Italy, and her Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the University of Portsmouth in the UK. She subsequently completed her postdoctoral training in Neuroscience at Harvard Medical School in Boston.

Dr. Arlotta is interested in understanding the molecular laws that govern the birth, differentiation, and assembly into working circuitry of clinically relevant neuron types in the cerebral cortex. She is driven to integrate developmental and evolutionary knowledge to inform novel strategies for circuit repair in the cortex and for modeling of human neuropsychiatric disease using next-generation, stem cell-derived human brain organoids.

Dr. Arlotta was a Merkin Institute Fellow at the Broad Institute of Harvard and M.I.T and a Robertson Investigator at the New York Stem Cell Foundation. She is the recipient of many awards, including the Charles E.W. Grinnell Award as an outstanding young scientist, the Star Family Prize for innovation in science, the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Prize from the Humboldt Foundation, the Fannie Cox Prize for excellence in teaching, and the George Ledlie Prize for contribution to science for the benefit of humankind.
Her work is published in Nature, Science, Nature Neuroscience, Neuron and Nature Cell Biology, among other journals.