Karthik Shekhar is John F. Heil Jr. Professor in the chemical and biomolecular engineering department at the University of California, Berkeley. His laboratory is cross-affiliated with neuroscience, vision science and the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. His interests are at the interface of neuroscience, genomics and applied mathematics, and his group uses both experimental and computational approaches to understand how diverse types of neurons in the brain develop and evolve, and how they become selectively vulnerable during diseases. He has received the NIH Pathway to Independence Award, the Hellman Fellowship and the McKnight Fellowship in Neuroscience. He also recently received the Donald E. Noyce Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.
Karthik Shekhar
Assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering
University of California, Berkeley
From this contributor
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Building a brain: How does it generate its exquisite diversity of cells?
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When is self-organization a mechanism in brain development?
Retinal waves offer a powerful example of a self-organizing system that can build structure without external guidance. The field would do well to embrace such phenomena more broadly as a type of mechanistic explanation.