Biography

LORENZ P. STUDER, MD, is the Director of the Center for Stem Cell Biology and a Member of the Developmental Biology Program at Memorial Sloan Kettering. As a native of Switzerland, he received his MD and doctorate degree from the University of Bern where he co-developed the first cell-based therapy for Parkinson's disease in the country. He subsequently trained as postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Ron McKay at the National Institutes of Health pioneering the therapeutic application of neural stem cell-derived neurons in models of neurodegeneration. In his laboratory, he has led the development of techniques that can turn human pluripotent stem cells into many of the specific cell types that comprise the central and the peripheral nervous system. He has also been among the first to realize the potential of patient-specific stem cell in modeling human disease and in drug discovery, and he described methods to manipulate cellular age in pluripotent stem cell-derived lineages. Furthermore, he is currently leading a multidisciplinary consortium to carry out the first clinical application of human stem cell-derived dopamine neurons for the treatment of Parkinson's disease. He recently co-founded BlueRock Therapeutics Inc, a major biotech startup focused on pluripotent stem cell-based cell therapies. Dr. Studer's work has been recognized by numerous awards including the Boyer Young Investigator award, the Annemarie Opprecht Award, a MacArthur fellowship, the Ogawa-Yamanaka Stem Cell Prize, the 2018 Gabbay Award and the 2022 ISSCR Achievement Award.