Paola Arlotta, Ph.D.

Paola Arlotta is an institute member at the Broad Institute and an associate member of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute. A leading neuroscientist, Arlotta is interested in understanding the molecular laws that govern the birth, differentiation, and assembly into working circuitry of clinically relevant neuron types in the cerebral cortex. The complexity of the nervous system fascinates her and she is driven to integrate developmental and evolutionary knowledge to inform novel strategies for circuit repair in the cortex and for modeling of neuropsychiatric disease in the dish using self-organizing, stem cell-derived brain organoids.

In addition to her work at the Broad, Arlotta is the departmental chair and Golub Family Professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology at Harvard University. She is also a principal faculty member at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, where she is co-director of the neuroscience program.

Arlotta received her M.S. in biochemistry from the University of Trieste, Italy, and her Ph.D. in molecular biology from the University of Portsmouth in the UK. She subsequently completed her postdoctoral training in neuroscience at Harvard Medical School. Her research and teaching have received numerous awards, including, most recently, the George Ledlie Prize for her work studying the embryonic brain in health and disease, the Fannie Cox Prize for Excellence in Science Teaching, the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and a Merkin Institute Fellowship at the Broad.

Photo credit: Martin Adolfsson

December 2018