The Scintillon Institute is proud to announce the recent addition to its faculty, Dr. Albert Chen, a neurobiologist who specializes in examining the link between neural circuits and behavior in health and disease. 

Albert Chen joins Scintillon Institute as an Associate Professor of Neuroscience after spending eight years at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Research in his lab employs a multidisciplinary approach to define the molecular, anatomical, and functional distinctions of brain centers important for coordination and refinement of movement, motor learning, and complex motivated behaviors using genetic and viral circuit tracing, neural manipulations, deep brain imaging and quantitative behavioral approaches in mice.

The rising prevalence of obesity and eating disorders is a significant public health crisis, and dysfunctions of subcortical and hindbrain networks important for feeding behaviors and metabolism have been implicated. With a recently awarded R01 from the NIH, an exciting new project in the Chen lab aims to identify and characterize previously unknown components of the neural network that mediates food seeking and consumption, with a long-term goal of exploring the efficacy of drugs and brain stimulation as effective therapeutics for body weight control.

The Scintillon Institute's first publication, "Feeder-Free Derivation of Human Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells with Messenger RNA," by Jiwu Wang has been published in the new Nature family journal Scientific Reports.

The therapeutic promise of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) has spurred efforts to circumvent genome alteration when reprogramming somatic cells to pluripotency.  Our mRNA method uniquely affords unprecedented control over reprogramming factor (RF) expression while obviating a cleanup phase to purge residual traces of vector.