Nael Nadif Kasri,
Professor Medical Neurosciences for Neurodevelopmental Disorders
Nael Nadif Kasri studied biochemistry at the KU Leuven (Belgium), followed by a PhD (2000-2004) in molecular biology at the KU Leuven with Prof. Dr. Humbert de Smedt. During my PhD thesis, he studied the role of Ca2+ and calmodulin in the regulation of Calcium channels. After his PhD he worked as a postdoctoral researcher (2005-2010) in the lab of Prof. Dr. Linda van Aelst at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he studied the role of RhoGTPase signaling in excitatory synapses in the hippocampus. In 2010 he moved to the Netherlands and started his independent research group at the Radboudumc where he is part of the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour. In 2011 he received the Hypatia Fellowship and Marie Curie reintegration grant. The key goal is to reveal novel neurobiological concepts by resolving the genetic and epigenetic networks that are disrupted in neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs), including intellectual disabilities, autism spectrum disorder and epilepsy. His team uses a multi-level strategy that combines functional genomics and molecular & cellular neurobiological approaches, such as the generation and characterization of iPSC-derived human neural cells and mouse models. In particular, his expertise in the generation of patients-derived neural lineages and their neurophysiological analysis at single cell and network level (MEA) is setting the stage in this novel research field. Over the past years, he has established protocols to differentiate iPSCs into a variety of neural lineages (cortical, dopaminergic, serotonergic), with bonafide neurophysiological properties both at the single-cell and network activity level. His group has shown that MEAs offer a robust, efficient and physiologically relevant readout to probe for patient-specific neuronal network phenotypes to link genes to NDDs.
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