Rajesh Ambasudhan's Biography

Rajesh Ambasudhan, Research Assistant Professor, Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute

Rajesh Ambasudhan is an accomplished stem cell researcher working in the neuroscience area. He was trained under renowned stem cell biologist Prof. Sheng Ding at The Scripps Research Institute (now at UCSF). Dr. Ambasudhan has experience for over a decade in
working with hESCs) and human somatic stem cells. He and his former mentor Sheng Ding were among the first few in the world to adapt Yamanaka’s hiPSC technology and have made seminal contributions to this area, particularly in developing small molecule-based innovations to this technology (Nature Methods 2009, Cell Stem Cell 2010, Cell Res. 2014). Moreover, he is among the pioneers who invented the technique by which human skin cells can be directly converted to functionally mature neurons using a microRNA technique (Cell Stem Cell 2011). As a Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute (SBMRI) faculty, he has been developing human “disease-in-a-dish” models of neurodegenerative diseases. Of note is his use of this model in discovering the critical role of an aberrant MEF2-PGC1a pathway in Parkinson’s disease using isogenic stem cells (Cell, 2013), a work he conducted in collaboration with Prof. Rudolf Jaenisch at M.I.T.