Arnold Kriegstein, MD, PhD

Dr. Kriegstein received BA from Yale University and his MD and PhD degrees from New York University in 1977 where his thesis advisor was Dr. Eric Kandel. He subsequently completed Residency training in Neurology at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Children’s Hospital, and Beth Israel Hospital in Boston. He has held academic appointments at Stanford University, Yale University, and Columbia University. In 2004 he joined the Neurology Department at the University of California, San Francisco. He founded the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCSF and served as Director from 2004-2021. Dr. Kriegstein’s own research focuses on the way in which neural stem and progenitor cells in the embryonic brain produce neurons, and ways in which this information can be used for cell based therapies to treat diseases of the nervous system. His lab found that radial glial cells are neuronal stem cells in the developing brain, and also identified a second type of precursor cell produced by radial glial cells that is responsible for generating specific neuronal subtypes. He has more recently focused on human brain development and described a novel progenitor cell type, the outer radial glial cell, that contributes to the huge expansion of the cerebral cortex. He is using single cell transcriptomics and multi-omics as well as spatial transcriptomics to understand how neuronal diversity is produced during brain development. Organoid models are also employed for functional studies as well as insights into disease mechanisms.