McLean Bolton, Ph.D.

Research Group Leader, MPFI

Dr. M. McLean Bolton started her research program at the Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience as an independent Research Group Leader focusing on disorders of neural circuitry in January of 2011. Prior to this appointment, she was a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Pediatrics, Division of Neurology at Duke University Medical Center (2008-2010).

John H. Morrison, Ph.D.

Distinguished Professor, School of Medicine, UC Davis

Dr. Morrison’s research program focuses primarily on the neurobiology of aging and neurodegenerative disorders, particularly as they relate to cellular and synaptic organization of the cerebral cortex. His lab is developing a comprehensive model of synaptic health in the cerebral cortex and how molecular and structural deviations from this profile induced by age and endocrine disruption impact cognitive performance. Dr. Morrison is also investigating the degree to which age-related alterations in structural and molecular attributes of the synapse that lead to cognitive decline leave the brain vulnerable to Alzheimer’s Disease.

Doug Richardson, Ph.D.

Senior Research Scientist & Lecturer, Harvard University

Doug received his PhD from the Department of Pathology and Molecular Medicine at Queen’s University (Canada) in the field of cancer cell biology. Following his graduate studies, he continued to refine his skills as an Alexander von Humbolt post-doctoral fellow in the lab of Professor Stefan Hell (Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 2014) at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry. Here, Doug worked on a number of biological applications for super-resolution imaging. Doug was the inaugural Director of Imaging of the Harvard Center for Biological Imaging, and in 2022 became a Senior Research Scientist in Harvard’s Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology; leading a research group focused on improving light microscopy and image analysis techniques.

Momoko Watanabe, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, UC Irvine

Momoko Watanabe earned a B.S. in Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2006. She then pursued her doctoral studies at UC Irvine, where she studied the mechanisms of forebrain patterning and used in vivo developmental principles to derive choroid plexus epithelial cells from mouse and human pluripotent stem cells (PSCs) for cell-based therapeutic applications. Building on her excitement and experience with neural development and stem cell biology, she did her first post-doctoral training at RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Japan, to focus on the three-dimensional culture of cerebral cortex structures, so called brain organoids, generated from hPSCs. She then moved back to the U.S. and joined UCLA. Her project focused on the development of highly efficient and reproducible cerebral organoid methods to investigate the origins of cortical neural circuits and model neurodevelopmental disorders, including the Congenital Zika Syndrome. Building upon these accomplishments, she successfully received a NIH K99/R00 grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). She was recently recruited to UC Irvine as a part of Faculty Hiring for Leveraged Research Excellence (FHLRE) “Stem Cells in Tissue Engineering” and started as an Assistant Professor at the Anatomy and Neurobiology Department in 2020. She is very excited to contribute to a synergistic interdepartmental concentration in stem cell-based engineering.

Henner Koch, Ph.D.,

RWTH University Hospital, Germany

A detailed analysis of the dendritic and axonal structure of human neurons