Three faculty members from UC San Francisco have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), one of the highest honors accorded to American scientists.
Geeta Narlikar, PhD, Arturo Alvarez-Buylla, PhD, and Holly Ingraham, PhD, were welcomed to the academy on April 26. Their election brings the total number of past and present UCSF members of the esteemed scientific academy to 61.
Arturo Alvarez-Buylla, PhD.
Alvarez-Buylla is the Heather and Melanie Muss Endowed Chair and Professor of Neurological Surgery. His lab studies the mechanisms behind the production, proliferation, migration, and integration of new neurons in the neonatal and adult brain. The lab identified the adult neural stem cells in rodents and has shown that these progenitors produce different types of neurons, depending on their location, dispelling major claims in the stem cell field. His lab also identified novel forms of migration of young neurons and recently uncovered massive numbers of neurons migrating to specific locations in the postnatal frontal lobe of children, defining a new stage in infant brain development. In addition, Alvarez-Buylla and collaborators pioneered animal studies on the transplantation of cells from the developing medial ganglionic eminence, an approach that is helping to understand mechanisms of neural plasticity and could be key for brain repair.
Alvarez-Buylla joined the UCSF faculty in 2000.