Alvarez—Buylla, Arturo

A LEADER IN the field of neuroscience and stem cell—neurobiology research, Arturo Alvarez—Buylla has been involved in considerable research into the assembly of brains, brain tumors, and their repair as well as the ontogeny and the phylogeny of behavior. This work has covered not only developmental biology, developmental neuroscience, and neurobiology but also molecular and cellular neu—robiology, as well as the field of plasticity. Dr. Alvarez—Buylla has himself been involved in designing a device for mounting tissue sections on histological slides, developing a digital stereotaxic apparatus for mice and songbirds, working on a computer—based mapping system for tissue sections, and developing fluorescent staining techniques.

Arturo Alvarez—Buylla completed his Bachelor of Science degree at Queen's University, Kingston, Canada, in 1978, and from 1981 to 1982 he studied at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM), in Coyoacân with an Undergraduate International Fellowship, remaining at the university until 1983, when he gained his license in Biomédical Research at UNAM, also gaining the university's Medal Gavino Barreda. While at UNAM, Dr. Alvarez—Buylla was involved in graduate courses at the university; he then went to Rockefeller University in New York, completing his doctoral thesis, “Radial Glia and the Migration of Young Neurons in the Adult Avian Brain,” which was accepted in 1988.

For the next year, Dr. Alvarez—Buylla was involved in postdoctoral research at Rockefeller University, remaining at the university until 2000, working as an assistant professor from 1989 until 1991, as assistant professor and head of laboratory from 1991 until 1995, and as associate professor and head of laboratory from 1995 until 2000. It was when he was at Rockefeller University that Dr. Alvarez—Buylla was able to show that precursor cells were found in the same region in brains of both adult mice and birds. In 2002 he won the Robert L. Sinsheimer Award in Molecular Biology.

In 2001, Dr. Alvarez—Buylla moved to the Neuro—surgery Research Department at the University of California, San Francisco, where he continued his research in neurosurgery, wining the Jacob Javits Award in 2000; two years later, he shared with Dr. R. McKay and Dr. S. Weiss the Neuronal Plasticity Prize from the Fondation IPSEN in France.

As he is involved in the production of many scholarly papers, Dr. Alvarez—Buylla's work has appeared in many journals including Cell Tissue Research, the Journal of Comparative Neurology, the Journal of Neuroscience, the New England Journal of Medicine, and Science. His most recent work has been on the extending of knowledge over the use and adaptability of neural cells in the adult mammalian brain and their use in generating new neurons and glia. It has seen a number of important breakthroughs in the field, first outlined in his article, with Florian T. Merkle, titled “Neural Stem Cells in Mammalian Development,” published in Current Opinion in Cell Biology on October 11, 2006; in his article, with many collaborators, on “Postnatal Deletion of Numb/Numblike Reveals Repair and Remodeling Capacity in the Subven—tricular Neurogenic Niche,” published in Cell on December 15, 2006; in another article, coauthored with Daniel A. Lim and Yin—Cheng Huang, “The Adult Neural Stem Cell Niche: Lessons for Future Neural Cell Replacement Strategies,” published in Neurosurgery Clinics of North America on January 18, 2007; and in another article written with Florian T. Merkle and Zaman Mirzadeh, “Mosaic Organization of Neural Stem Cells in the Adult Brain,” published in Science on July 5, 2007.

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