Lalitha Madhavan, MD, PhD

Dr. Madhavan’s research concentrates on stem cells and their applications to neurological diseases. The ultimate goal of these studies is to use this research to devise brain repair strategies for neurological disorders, based on the manipulation of stem cells and also in combination with alternate approaches.

Her current projects center on Parkinson’s disease using primarily cell culture and rodent animal models. More specifically, some ongoing endeavors are (1) studying stem cells in the context of aging, (2) generation of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) from Parkinson’s patients to study the etiology of Parkinson’s disease, and (3) testing the therapeutic feasibility of various types of human stem cells in preclinical models of Parkinson’s disease.

Her research team uses a variety of techniques to study stem cells and neurological disease including cell culture, in vitro assays, animal surgery/modeling, animal behavior, cell transplantation, mitotic labeling, retroviral reporters/gene transfer, RNA interference and immunohistochemistry.