What makes brain development go awry and how can we optimize neurological function in children with congenital malformations and brain injury?

Dr. Phan is a Yale- and Johns Hopkins-trained MD/PhD physician-scientist currently conducting postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts General Hospital. His long-term goals are to understand what happens when the brain fails to develop properly and how can we put the brain back on the right track. To that end, his translational research strategy uses functional genomics, human patient samples, and animal model systems to generate a molecular “map” of the genes and the cell types in which they act in different neurological conditions affecting brain development and vascular function. His NIH F30 and F32-funded work has led to new mechanistic understanding of hydrocephalus, the most common reason for brain surgery in children that is also commonly associated with Alzheimer's Disease in the elderly, informing human clinical trials (NCT06563817) that may lead to non-invasive medical therapies as an alternative to neurosurgical operations. He has published 75 papers on PubMed with a Google-Scholar h-index of 24, in journals such as Nature, Nature Neuroscience, Cell, Neuron, Nature Medicine, Science Translational Medicine, Nature Communications, JAMA Neurology, JAMA Pediatrics, Brain, and PNAS.