Claude Desplan BS, DSc, PhD

Dr. Claude Desplan is a Silver Professor of Biology and Neuroscience at NYU and an Affiliate Professor at the CGSB at NYU in Abu Dhabi. He was born in Algeria and was trained at the Ecole Normale Supérieure of St. Cloud, France. He received his DSc at INSERM in Paris in 1983 working with Drs. Moukhtar and Thomasset on calcium regulation. He joined Pat O’Farrell at UCSF as a postdoc where he demonstrated that the homeodomain, a conserved signature of many developmental genes, is a DNA binding motif. In 1987, he joined the Faculty of Rockefeller University as an HHMI Assistant and Associate Investigator to pursue structural studies of the homeodomain and the evolution of axis formation.

In 1999, Dr. Desplan joined NYU where he investigates the generation of neural diversity using the Drosophila visual system as a model. His team has described the molecular mechanisms that pattern the eye and showed how stochastic decisions contribute to the diversification of photoreceptors. It also investigates the development and function of the optic lobes where neuronal diversity is generated by Spatio-temporal patterning of neuroblasts, a mechanism that also applies to cortical development in mammals. Recently, his lab has also provided a functional understanding of the neuronal and computational mechanisms underlying motion detection.