Human brain development and neuropsychiatric disorders of higher cognitive functions
Flora Vaccarino leads a multidisciplinary research group focusing on the study of human brain development, using induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) biology and genomics as tools. Vaccarino’s interests are the characterization of gene regulatory mechanisms that shape the earliest cell fate decisions in typical and atypical human brain development, using iPSC-derived brain organoids as tools. She is also interested in understanding the impact of somatic genomic variation on human development, lineage tracing, and its implications for neuropsychiatric diseases.
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Biography
Vaccarino received her MD from the University of Padova in Italy. She was a neuropharmacology fellow at NIH, trained in clinical psychiatry at Yale, and raised through the ranks to assistant, associate, and full professor at the Yale School of Medicine. Vaccarino and her lab pioneered the generation of 3D brain organoids from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) and showed that they recapitulate early fetal development of the human cerebral cortex. Her lab has generated an extensive collection of patient-derived iPSC lines to study altered gene regulatory mechanisms in autism spectrum disorders and other neuropsychiatric diseases.