Silvia Velasco

Murdoch Childrens Research Institute, Australia

Silvia Velasco leads the Neural Stem Cells Laboratory at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute and is principal investigator at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Stem Cell Medicine, ReNEW, in Melbourne, Australia. Her laboratory uses pluripotent stem cell-derived neural organoid models that reproducibly recapitulate aspects of the complexity of the developing human brain,  to study human brain development and understand how alterations during this process lead to neurodevelopmental, neuropsychiatric, and neurodegenerative disorders. Her research interest in stem cell biology and developmental neuroscience began during her postdoctoral training at New York University and The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, in the USA. She completed her Ph.D. in Human Biology and B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Medical Biotechnology at the University of Turin in Italy.