Pierre Vanderhaeghen is full professor of neuroscience and group leader at the VIB–KU Leuven Center for Brain and Disease Research in Leuven, Belgium. He is co-leading the Human Brain Evolution Initiative.
Vanderhaeghen graduated with an MD (1992) and a PhD (1996) in medicine and biomedical sciences from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Belgium. He then joined the laboratory of John Flanagan at Harvard Medical School in Cambridge, US, as a postdoctoral fellow. In 2001 he became a tenured research scientist at the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research and the ULB, where in 2013 he was appointed full professor. In 2018 he took on the positions of full professor of neuroscience at KU Leuven University and group leader at the VIB Institute, joining the newly created VIB–KU Leuven Center for Brain and Disease Research.
Research Focus
Vanderhaeghen and his team study the mechanisms of cerebral cortex development, investigating how these are linked to human brain evolution and diseases. They pioneered in vitro and in vivo models of corticogenesis from pluripotent stem cells, through which they discovered the key influence of cell-intrinsic properties of neural stem cells and neurons on human brain evolution and neurodevelopmental diseases.
Awards and Recognition
Vanderhaeghen’s scientific achievements have earned him numerous awards, including the 2011 Francqui Prize (the most prestigious Belgian award to a scientist under age 50), the 2010 Roger De Spoelberch Prize for mid-career European neuroscientists, the 2013 AXA Foundation Chair in Neuroscience and Longevity, and the 2021 Remedios Caro Almela Prize in developmental neurobiology. He has been an elected member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) and the Royal Academy of Medicine of Belgium since 2009.
Feature image: Portrait courtesy of Pierre Vanderhaeghen. Right: Catching human neurons in action: in vivo calcium imaging of human pluripotent stem cell–derived cortical pyramidal neurons transplanted in the mouse visual cortex. (Photo: Ben Vermaercke, Bonin and Vanderhaeghen Laboratories)