ISSCR 2027 Annual Meeting
Annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research at the Moscone West Convention Center, San Francisco, recognizing 25 years of discovery, collaboration, and progress in stem cell science.
Cell Bio 2026 - An ASCB|EMBO Meeting
Joint ASCB|EMBO meeting at the San Diego Convention Center bringing together the cell biology community to share scientific discoveries, network with colleagues across career stages, and explore new research areas and methodologies.
Stem Cell & Developmental Biology Early Career Symposium
A three-day scientific symposium led by early-career scientists, combining invited talks, selected short talks, poster sessions, workshops, networking, and cross-disciplinary exchange in stem cell and developmental biology.
Developmental and evolutionary perspectives on thalamic function
Brain organization and function is a complex topic. We are good at establishing correlates of perception and behavior across forebrain circuits, as well as manipulating activity in these circuits to affect behavior. However, we still lack good models for the large-scale organization and function of the forebrain. What are the contributions of the cortex, basal ganglia, and thalamus to behavior? In addressing these questions, we often ascribe function to each area as if it were an independent processing unit. However, we know from the anatomy that the cortex, basal ganglia, and thalamus, are massively interconnected in a large network. One way to generate insight into these questions is to consider the evolution and development of forebrain systems. In this talk, I will discuss the developmental and evolutionary (comparative anatomy) data on the thalamus, and how it fits within forebrain networks. I will address questions including, when did the thalamus appear in evolution, how is the thalamus organized across the vertebrate lineage, and how can the change in the organization of forebrain networks affect behavioral repertoires.
Retinal neurogenesis and lamination: What to become, where to become it and how to move from there!
The vertebrate retina is an important outpost of the central nervous system, responsible for the perception and transmission of visual information. It consists of five different types of neurons that reproducibly laminate into three layers, a process of crucial importance for the organ’s function. Unsurprisingly, impaired fate decisions as well as impaired neuronal migrations and lamination lead to impaired retinal function. However, how processes are coordinated at the cellular and tissue level and how variable or robust retinal formation is, is currently still underexplored. In my lab, we aim to shed light on these questions from different angles, studying on the one hand differentiation phenomena and their variability and on the other hand the downstream migration and lamination phenomena. We use zebrafish as our main model system due to its excellent possibilities for live imaging and quantitative developmental biology. More recently we also started to use human retinal organoids as a comparative system. We further employ cross disciplinary approaches to address these issues combining work of cell and developmental biology, biomechanics, theory and computer science. Together, this allows us to integrate cell with tissue-wide phenomena and generate an appreciation of the reproducibility and variability of events.
Adult neurogenesis in mouse hippocampus
Dr. Aixa V. Morales has been working for more than 20 years in the field of Developmental Biology and from 2005, she is the PI of the laboratory on “Molecular Control of Neurogenesis” at Cajal Institute. Along these years, she has contributed to understanding the control of neurogenesis during development, the dorsoventral specification of neural progenitors, and the temporal control of the migration of neural crest cells. More recently, her lab interest moved towards understanding modulation of adult neurogenesis. Her lab current interest is the control of quiescence, as a mechanism of long-term neural stem cell maintenance in adult niches.