Head: Prof. Dr. med. Simon T. Schäfer

Link to own homepage: https://www.professoren.tum.de/schaefer-simon

Research areas

• Development of novel organoid technologies to model human brain development
• Personalized disease models to study neurodevelopmental disorders (e.g. autism spectrum disorder) and neuropsychiatric disorders (e.g. bipolar disorder)
• Zellular neurodevelopment models to study neurodevelopmental disorders (e.g. autism spectrum disorder) and neuropsychiatric disorders (e.g. bipolar disorder)
• . bipolar disorder)
• Cellular and molecular mechanisms of human brain development
• Neuro-Immune interactions in the central nervous system
• Stem cell-based approaches to tissue repair in the central nervous system

Current projects

• A novel model system to study the specification of human microglia in the human tissue context and in the context of neuropsychiatric diseases (German Research Foundation)
• Stem cell-based approaches to decipher context-dependent states of human microglia (German Research Foundation, TRR167 NeuroMac)

Selected publications

URL to my full list of published work: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/myncbi/simon.schafer.1/bibliography/public/

• Schafer S.T. #*, Mansour A.A.*, Schlachetzki J.C.M., Pena M., Ghassemzadeh S., Mitchell L., Mar A., Quang D., Stumpf S., Santisteban Ortiz I., Lana A.J., Baek C., Zaghal R., Glass C.K., Nimmerjahn A., Gage F.H.* (2023). An in vivo neuroimmune organoid model to study human microglia phenotypes. Cell 186, 2111-2126

[#Lead Contact and *co-corresponding author]

• Wang M, Gage, F.H. & Schafer, S.T.* (2023) Transplantation strategies to enhance maturity and cellular complexity in brain organoids. Biological Psychiatry 93, 616-621 [*corresponding author]
• Bermperidis, T., Schafer, S.T., Gage, F.H., Sejnowski, T., and Torres, E.B. (2022). Dynamic Interrogation of Stochastic Transcriptome Trajectories Using Disease Associated Genes Reveals Distinct Origins of Neurological and Psychiatric Disorders. Front Neurosci 16, 884707
• Schafer, S.T. & Gage F.H. (2021) The When and Where: Molecular and Cellular Convergence in Autism. Biological Psychiatry 89 (5), 419-420; doi: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2020.12.016
• Mertens, J., Herdy, J. R., Traxler, L., Schafer, S.T., Schlachetzki, J. C. M., ... Gage, F. H. (2021) Age-dependent instability of mature neuronal fate in induced neurons from Alzheimer's patients. Cell Stem Cell 28, 1533-48
• Schafer, S.T., Paquola, A.C.M., Stern, S., Gosselin, D., Ku, M., Pena, M., Kuret, T.J.M., Liyanage, M., Mansour, A.A., Jaeger, B.N., Marchetto, M.C., Glass, C.K., Mertens, J. & Gage, F.H. (2019). Pathological priming causes developmental gene network heterochronicity in autistic subject-derived neurons. Nature Neuroscience 22, 243
• Gonçalves, J.T.*, Schafer, S.T.* & Gage, F.H. (2016). Adult Neurogenesis in the Hippocampus: From Stem Cells to Behavior. Cell 167, 897-914 [*equal contribution]
• Han, J., Kim, H.J.*, Schafer, S.T. *, Paquola, A., Clemenson, G.D., Toda, T., Oh, J., Pankonin, A.R., Lee, B.S., Johnston, S.T., Sarkar, A., Denli, A.M. & Gage, F.H. (2016). Functional Implications of miR-19 in the Migration of Newborn Neurons in the Adult Brain. Neuron 91, 79-89 [equal contribution]
• Mertens, J., Wang, Q.W., Kim, Y., Yu, D.X., Pham, S., Yang, B., Zheng, Y., Diffenderfer, K. E., Zhang, J., Soltani, S., Eames, T., Schafer, S.T., Boyer, L., Marchetto, M.C., Nurnberger, J.I., Calabrese, J.R., Oedegaard, K.J., McCarthy, M.J., Zandi, P.P., Alda, M., Nievergelt, C.M., Mi, S., Brennand, K.J., Kelsoe, J.R., Gage, F.H. & Yao, J. (2015) Differential responses to lithium in hyperexcitable neurons from patients with bipolar disorder. Nature 527, 95-99
• Schafer, S.T., Han, J., Pena, M., von Bohlen und Halbach, O., Peters, J. & Gage, F. H. (2015). The Wnt Adaptor Protein ATP6AP2 Regulates Multiple Stages of Adult Hippocampal Neurogenesis. J Neurosci 35, 4983-4998 [corresponding author]

Collaborations

• Prof. Dr. Fred. H. Gage, The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, USA
• Prof. Dr. Josef Priller, Department of Psychiatry, TUM
• Prof. Dr. Christopher K. Glass, University of California San Diego (UCSD), USA
• Prof. Dr. Axel Nimmerjahn, The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, USA
• Prof. Dr. Magdalena Götz, Department oof Physiological Genomics, LMU

Team members

Irene Santisteban-Ortiz (PhD student)

irene.santisteban@tum.de

Janina Kaspar (PhD student)

janina.kaspar@tum.de

Lucia Rodriguez Martinez (PhD student)

lucia.rodriguez@tum.de

Lisa Mitchell (external PhD student)

limitchell@salk.edu

Zuhdi Ahmad (MSc student)

zuhdi.ahmad@tum.de

Monique Pena Schäfer (Scientist and Lab Manager)

monique.schaefer@tum.de