Tom Clandinin

Tom Clandinin is the Shooter Family Professor and chair of the Department of Neurobiology at Stanford University. He completed his Ph.D. under the guidance of Paul Sternberg at the California Institute of Technology in 1998, before beginning his postdoctoral work at University of California, Los Angeles in the lab of Larry Zipursky. He established his lab at Stanford in 2002. Tom has trained more than 20 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows over his time at Stanford. His honors include an NIH Director's Pioneer Award, a career development award from the Burroughs Welcome Fund, a Searle Scholar Award, a Sloan Research Fellowship, and a Scholar Award from the McKnight Foundation.

His laboratory is focused on two questions, namely, how do complex neuronal circuits assemble during development and disassemble in disease and how do such circuits mediate the complex computations essential to behavior? By examining the interplay between these questions, he hopes to uncover fundamental new insights into the molecular mechanisms and functional consequences of neurodegenerative disease. The lab has developed a new model by which interactions among developing neurons determine the wiring diagram of the brain, and have defined the structure of one of the fundamental computational units of the visual system, a circuit that measures the movement of objects across your eye. More recent work has uncovered a new molecular mechanism by which genes associated with Parkinson's Disease are linked to the loss of connections between neurons. To learn more visit here.

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