Alejandro F. Schinder

Alejandro Schinder received his M.Sc. in Biology from the University of Buenos Aires (1990), and his Ph.D. from the Department of Biology, University of California, San Diego (1996), where he studied the role of mitochondria in excitotoxic neuronal death. In 1997 he became a postdoc in Mu-ming Poo’s lab at UCSD, where he investigated the mechanisms underlying synapse formation and plasticity in developing hippocampal neurons. In 2000 he joined Fred Gage’s lab at the Salk Institute of La Jolla, California, to carry out a second postdoc on adult neurogenesis. This exciting problem immediately became the central question that captured his scientific interest. He returned to Argentina in 2002 to establish the Laboratory of Neuronal Plasticity at the Leloir Institute. His lab is currently focused on the functional relevance of adult hippocampal neurogenesis as well as in cellular mechanisms of neurodegeneration.

He is currently Independent Investigator of the National Research Council (CONICET, Argentina), and International Research Scholar of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI, USA). He is also member of the editorial boards of Developmental Neurobiology, Frontiers in Neurogenesis, and Frontiers in Neural Circuits, and Faculty Member of Faculty of 1000 Biology (Neuroscience). In 2009 he was elected Vice President of the Argentine Society for Neuroscience (SAN).