Steindler, Dennis A.

DENNIS A. STEINDLER is executive director of the McKnight Brain Institute and professor of medical research at the Departments of Neuroscience and Neurosurgery at the Movement Disorders Center at the University of Florida. His main research has involved investigating stem cell therapy and using this knowledge as a way of treating debilitating neurobiological diseases.

Essentially, Steindler has divided his research goals into five categories. The first involves the development and refinement of new in vitro methodologies that will, to a large extent, rely on insights from the studies of hematopoiesis, which can be used to selectively expand particular stem cells or progenitor cell populations, which in turn can control their differentiation into particular types of neurons. The second category of research includes work to discover the genes involved in stem cell growth and differentiation, using the clonal populations of stem and progenitor cells as a model for neurogenesis, by creating cDNA libraries from normal and neurologically diseased brains.

The last three goals involve the use by a dedicated transplant laboratory research group of animal models of neurodegenerative disease, which can be used to refine methods of integrating grafted stem and progenitor cells into altered adult brain circuitries, investigations into the plasticity of stem cells and homing in on a variety of human tissues, and devoting a research team to study the distinct stem and progenitor cell populations.

Steindler completed his bachelor's degree in zoology from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and completed his doctorate in anatomy and neuroscience from the University of California, San Francisco, with his thesis titled, “Neuronal Specificity and the Nervous System of the Reeler Mouse: The Distribution of Spinocerebellar Afférents in the Cerebellum of the Normal and Reeler Mutant Mouse.” In 1992, he was working in the Department of Anatomy at the University of Tennessee College of Medicine, Memphis. After getting his doctorate, Steindler completed his postdoctoral training at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry (Karl Friedrich Bonhoeffer Institute), Göttingen, Germany. He then returned to the United States to take a position as professor of neuroscience and neurosurgery at the University of Florida College of Medicine, becoming executive director of the McKnight Brain Institute on December 1, 2004.

Throughout his medical career, Steindler has been the author or coauthor of 83 major scientific papers, which have been published in a range of scientific and medical journals such as Brain Pathology, Development, Glia, Neuroscience, Neurosurgery Clinics of North America, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. His first two major journal articles, with himself as sole author, were “Locus Coeruleus Neurons Have Axons that Branch to the Forebrain and Cerebellum,” published in Brain Research in 1981, and “Differences in the Labeling of Axons of Passage by Wheat Germ Agglutinin After Uptake by Cut Peripheral Nerve versus Injections within the Central Nervous System,” published in Brain Research in 1982. This work was followed by joint—authored papers in the Journal of Neuroscience Methods and in Neuroscience. In 1986, his article, “Trigeminocerebellar, Trigeminotectal, and Trigeminothalamic Projections: A Double Retrograde Axonal Tracing Study in the Mouse,” again with himself as the sole author—rare for medical [Page 516]papers—was published in the Journal of Comparative Neurology. Many of his subsequent papers had only two authors, which is also unusual for major medical work, showing the importance of Steindler's work. Mention should also be made of his review article, coauthored with E. D. Laywell, “Boundaries and Wounds, Glia and Glycoconju—gates. Cellular and Molecular Analyses of Developmental Partitions and Adult Brain Lesions,” published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Science in 1991, and his paper, coauthored with L. B. Thomas, D. J. Gates, E. K. Richfield, T. F. O'Brien, and J. B. Schweitzer, “DNA End Labeling (TUNEL) in Huntington's Disease and Other Neuropathological Conditions,” published in the Journal of Neuropathology and Experimental Neurology in June 1995.

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