User:AuthorAuthor/Alysson Muotri

Alysson R. Muotri, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego, is a brain organoid expert and neuroscientist.

Early life and education
As a child growing up in São Paulo, Brazil, he became interested in nature.

Muotri graduated in 1995 with a Bachelor of Science in biological sciences from the State University of Campinas. He earned a doctorate degree in genetics in 2001 from the University of Sao Paulo, in Brazil. He went on to the Salk Institute as a Pew Latin America Fellow in 2002 for a postdoctoral training in the fields of neuroscience and stem cell biology.

Career
Muotri has been a professor at the School of Medicine, University of California in San Diego since 2008 and is a director of the university's Stem Cell Program.

He created his first brain organoids – clusters of living brain cells – in 2014 with stem cells from the father of an autistic boy. Tiny “brains," called organoids, have been grown in the Muotri Lab, named after him, at the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine since 2011.

Personal life
In 2016, Muotri married Andrea Coimbra, from Brazil, whose son Ivan, then 5, has severe autism. She contacted Muotri in 2010 after learning from a television interview about his work with autism, and the couple eventually met and married.