Neşet Özel, Ph.D., a neuroscientist, will join the Stowers Institute in the fall of 2023 as an Assistant Investigator. Özel’s research combines genetics, imaging, single-cell genomics, and computational modeling approaches to understand the fundamental molecular mechanisms that control brain development in Drosophila.

Özel was raised in Ankara, Turkey and completed his B.S. in molecular biology and genetics at Bilkent University. He studies the development of fruit fly (Drosophila) brains, a nervous system whose cell-type diversity and connectome, or map of neural connections, have been described in detail, providing the ideal balance between complexity and accessibility. As a graduate student in the lab of Robin Hiesinger, Ph.D., first at UT Southwestern in Dallas and then at Freie Universität Berlin, Özel approached this from a cell biology perspective with a focus on long-term live imaging of developing brains that allowed characterization of how filopodial dynamics mediate axon targeting/stabilization and synapse formation in vivo.

Özel joined the lab of Claude Desplan, Ph.D., at New York University as a postdoctoral fellow where he took a different approach to characterize the cell-type specific gene expression programs of more than 200 neuronal cell types in the Drosophila optic lobes using single-cell RNA sequencing throughout development. This enabled him to decipher the combinations of terminal selectors, (i.e., transcription factors) that instruct neuronal identities by virtue of their sustained expression, across their entire circuit. He showed that predictive and complete transformations of one neuronal type into another could be engineered solely by manipulating this code.

The Özel Lab at the Stowers Institute will investigate the gene regulatory networks both upstream and downstream of terminal selectors to predictably alter neuronal identity and connectivity.