Romanian-born Stanford University AP Sergiu Pasca named SIRS 2021 Basic Research Awardee

Romanian-born M.D. Sergiu Pasca of the Stanford University was named 2021 Basic Research Awardee by the Schizophrenia International Research Society (SIRS).

According to SIRS President, Dame Til Wykes, the award goes to a SIRS member who has made an outstanding basic research contribution to schizophrenia research.

Dr. Sergiu Pasca is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and the Bonnie Uytengsu and Family Director of Stanford Brain Organogenesis.

Interested in understanding the rules governing brain assembly and the mechanisms of disease, he developed some of the initial in-a-dish models of disease by deriving neurons from skin cells taken from patients with genetic neurodevelopmental disorders. He also pioneered a modular system to integrate 3D brain region-specific organoids and study migration and neural circuit formation in functional preparations known as assembloids. His laboratory has applied these models to gain novel insights into human physiology, evolution and disease mechanisms, and supported researchers around the world in learning and implementing these techniques, SIRS informs on its website.

Sergiu Pasca, who studied medicine in Romania before moving to the US, is the recipient of various other awards in the past, including the A.E. Bennett Award in Biological Psychiatry (2018), the Folch-Pi Neurochemistry Award (2017), the Günter Blobel Early Career Award for Cell Biology (2018), the Daniel E. Efron Award from ACNP (2018) and was a winner of the 2020 Falling Walls Breakthrough in Life Sciences Award. AGERPRES