Gist Croft, PhD
Gist's career interest is to use stem cells to model human development and neurodegenerative disease. He has been a Senior Research Investigator at the New York Stem Cell Foundation Research institute for 6 years. As a Research Associate in the Brivanlou Lab at The Rockefeller University, and Director of the Human Stem Cell Core, he lead the development of a new model of human embryo implantation (a Science Breakthrough of the Year 2016), and developed an isogenic stem cell model of Huntington's disease, which illuminated early developmental, loss of function chromosomal instability phenotypes (2018). As a graduate student at Columbia University, with Hynek Wichterle, and Chris Henderson, he collaborated on the first human stem cell model of ALS (Science and Time Breakthroughs of the Year 2008) and the first ALS patient stem cell cohorts and motor neuron subtype differentiation approaches (2011, 2013).
Vikram Khurana, MD
Vikram (Vik) Khurana, MD PhD, is a physician-scientist and chief of the Division of Movement Disorders at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Dr. Khurana and colleagues have advanced our understanding of the cellular consequences of alpha-synuclein-misfolding, the fundamental pathology associated with Parkinson’s and related diseases. They have identified and reversed alpha-synuclein pathologies in Parkinson’s patient stem cells, molecularly defined the relationship between these pathologies and genetic risk factors for the disease, and advanced therapies targeting alpha-synuclein to clinical trials. Dr. Khurana’s translational goal is to bring genomic and stem-cell technologies toward personalized diagnostics and therapeutics for Parkinson’s and related disorders. He is a former Fulbright Scholar, a George C. Cotzias Fellow of the American Parkinson’s Disease Association, and a New York Stem Cell Foundation Robertson Stem Cell Investigator. In 2020 his team was declared a grant recipient in The Michael J. Fox Foundation’s Ken Griffin Alpha-Synuclein Imaging Competition.
