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Joseph M. Verdi received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1991. He obtained postdoctoral training in Developmental neuroscience at the California Institute of Technology. Dr. Verdi joined the Center for Molecular Medicine at Maine Medical Center Research Institute in 2002 after five years as the Director of the Laboratory of Neural Stem Cell Biology Laboratory, John P. Robarts Research Institute, and Assistant Professor, Department of Physiology and Genetics, Graduate Program in Neuroscience, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada. Dr. Verdi has served as director, consultant and member of several medical and scientific committees.

Dr. Verdi’s laboratory currently focuses on three questions of paramount importance within the stem cell field. They are: describing the molecular and signaling events underlying instructive factor lineage restriction using neural crest stem cells and central nervous system stem cells as model systems; the mechanism underlying neural stem cell plasticity, i.e. elucidating the molecular mechanism by which neural stem cells differentiate into non-neural lineages or the molecular mechanism by which hematopoietic stem cells become neural tissue, and the identification of genes, factors and signaling pathways involved in asymmetric (lineage restriction) versus symmetric (self renewal) stem cell division. Our laboratory has made reasonable progress into answering each of these questions by successfully describing the factors, receptors, signaling pathways and mechanisms that direct normal stem cell development.