Julia Kaltschmidt PhD

Julia Kaltschmidt, PhD, is a Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute Faculty Scholar, a Firmenich Next Generation Faculty Scholar, and a Professor in the Department of Neurosurgery at Stanford Medical School. She received her undergraduate degree in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry from the University of Madison, Wisconsin, and completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge in the UK, where she trained as a developmental biologist and studied the Drosophila nervous system. During her postdoc at Columbia University, Dr. Kaltschmidt began working with the mouse as a model system and became interested in mechanisms that underlie circuit connectivity in the spinal cord.

At the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, her laboratory identified and manipulated spinal neuronal circuits that underlie locomotion. Since moving to Stanford, the focus of her lab has expanded to include the enteric nervous system (ENS), also called the “second brain”. The ENS is a network of enteric neurons that surrounds the gastrointestinal tract and controls its functions. The Kaltschmidt lab has adapted and developed state-of-the-art means to map the organization of ENS circuits, and has built collaborations with clinical gastroenterologists, surgeons, and bioengineers to devise means to understand how ENS circuit organization influences gastrointestinal tract function in health and disease states.