Bio
Dr. Sepand Rastegar studied Biology at the University of Strasbourg, France, where he obtained his diploma degree in 1996. Dr. Sepand Rastegar completed his PhD in the laboratory of Prof. Walter Knöchel at the University of Ulm, Germany. In 2000, Dr. Sepand Rastegar moved back to Strasbourg to do 2 years of post-doctoral research with Prof. Uwe Strähle at the IGBMC. In 2002, Dr. Sepand Rastegar obtained a permanent position at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM). In 2005, Dr. Sepand Rastegar moved to Germany to work at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). Currently, Dr. Sepand Rastegar is investigating the molecular mechanisms that regulate zebrafish neurogenesis and regeneration. His models are the embryonic spinal cord and the adult telencephalon. His full list of publications is available at https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4411-5646.

Bio
Alessandra Pierani is Director of Research at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). She heads the team “Genetics and Development of the Cerebral Cortex” with a dual affiliation at the Imagine Institute (Institut des Maladies Génétiques, Hôpital Necker Enfants malades, Paris) and the Institute of Psychiatry and Neurosciences of Paris (IPNP, Hôpital St Anne, Paris) (France). Her research focuses on the role of transient neuronal populations in cerebral cortex development, evolution and pathology. She obtained two PhDs in Biology at the University of Florence (1986) and University of Paris XI (1994), training first as a molecular biologist and biochemist at the Rockefeller University (New York). She then began her work on neural development at the Institut Curie (Orsay) and pursued it at Columbia University (New York) and the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris). From 2006 until 2017, she was a group leader at the Institut Jacques Monod in Paris. She was awarded a CNRS-ATIPE grant (1999), a City of Paris prize (2006) and the Foulon Prize of the French Academy of Science (2012).

Bio
Stéphane Nedelec is a team leader at the Institut du Fer à Moulin (IFM) in Paris (France). He is studying nervous system development in health and disease using 3D in vitro models engineered from human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs). Stéphane Nedelec carried out his PhD with Alain Trembleau and Alain Prochiantz at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris) where he studied local protein synthesis in neurons. Then, Stéphane Nedelec joined Hynek Wichterle’s lab at Columbia University where he used in vitro differentiation of mouse embryonic stem cells to study axon guidance mechanisms during spinal cord development and disease. In 2012, Stéphane Nedelec joined I-Stem institute (Evry, France). In Cécile Martinat’s group, he started a program aiming to study human developmental biology. Using hPSCs, they developed a powerful approach to assess how extrinsic cues control cell fate. They discovered pathways sufficient to engineer distinct human neuronal subtypes, including a rapid and efficient way to generate spinal motor neurons. In 2016, Stéphane Nedelec started a new research group at IFM in which he combined 3D hPSC-differentiation in specific cell types or organoids, transcriptomic analysis, live imaging and pharmacological approaches to study normal and pathological spinal cord development. This group seeks to decode the mechanisms by which extrinsic cues control genetic programs to instruct the specification and organization of human spinal neural diversity and how genetic mutations perturb these events to cause neurodevelopmental disorders.