Speaker Profile
Niels Ringstad

Niels Ringstad PhD

Cell and Developmental Biology, Neuroscience
New York, New York, United States of America

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Niels Ringstad, Ph.D., assistant professor of cell biology at NYU Langone Medical Center, believes he has only just begun to scratch the surface of its biochemical complexity. For scientists, the worm’s outward simplicity is its greatest asset. Its translucency offers a convenient window onto a compact nervous system, which functions, cell to cell, in much the same way that ours does. Only instead of a chaotic universe of 100 trillion cellular junctions or synapses, it has just 8,000, all of which have been neatly mapped. Perhaps no organism has been more examined than C. elegans, and yet there is so much more we can learn from it. This simple fact is the engine that propels.

Dr. Ringstad’s research. Since opening his laboratory at the Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine in 2009, when he joined NYU Langone, the scientist has spent countless hours peering into a microscope, examining the neurons of C. elegans for clues to the cellular underpinnings of psychiatric disorders like depression and schizophrenia, for which there are desperately few treatment options. His latest discoveries, including genetic mutations that disrupt the brain chemicals serotonin and dopamine, build on a body of work conducted as a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There, he studied under the tutelage of H. Robert Horvitz, Ph.D., a leading authority on C. elegans, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2002 for his discovery of programmed cell death in C. elegans.
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