Nenad Sestan ’99 PhD, P ’20, P ’26

Nenad Sestan is the Harvey and Kate Cushing Professor of Neuroscience and professor of comparative medicine, of genetics and of psychiatry. He is the executive director of the Genome Editing Center and a member of the Kavli Institute for Neuroscience at Yale School of Medicine. He obtained his MD from the University of Zagreb and his PhD in neurobiology from Yale University.

Sestan’s laboratory investigates how neural circuits form within the developing cerebral cortex. He also studies how neural circuits were modified during human evolution and may become compromised in neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders. Most recently, his laboratory discovered that the large mammalian (porcine) brain is more resilient to a lack of oxygen than previously thought. It also described a first-in-class technology that can restore brain perfusion and reverse some of the effects of oxygen deprivation.

Sestan is the recipient of several international honors and awards, including the Constance Lieber Prize and the Krieg Cortical Discoverer Prize, and he was named a NARSAD (National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression) Distinguished Investigator (awarded by the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation), a McDonnell Scholar, and a Krieg Cortical Scholar. He is also a member of the National Academy of Medicine (NAM), Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering. He has been a member of the BrainSpan, BRAIN Initiative Cell Census Network, and PsychENCODE consortia and has been featured in Nature’s “10 People Who Mattered in Science in 2019.”