Seth Shipman, PhD

Assistant Professor, Gladstone Institutes at UCSF

Shipman holds a BA in neuroscience from Wesleyan University and a PhD in neuroscience from UC San Francisco, where he worked with Roger Nicoll to understand the molecular events that drive formation of synapses in the brain. His graduate work uncovered how a family of adhesion molecules, called neuroligins, can influence both synaptogenesis and plasticity. Shipman conducted postdoctoral research in genetics, synthetic biology, and stem cell biology at Harvard Medical School and Harvard University with George Church and Jeffrey Macklis, where he developed an approach to store information into the genomic DNA of living cells. This work was featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and elsewhere, and was named as one of Discover magazine’s top 25 stories of the year.