Pierre Vanderhaeghen earned his M.D. in 1992 and his Ph.D. in 1996, both from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) in Belgium. He next joined Harvard Medical School as a postdoctoral fellow. In 2001, he established his own laboratory at ULB, where he became a professor and the founding director of the ULB Neuroscience Institute. In 2018, he moved to Leuven (Belgium) as full professor at KU Leuven’s Department of Neurosciences and a group leader at the VIB-KU Leuven Center for Brain & Disease Research.

Research in the Vanderhaeghen lab is focused on exploring the mechanisms of development and evolution of the cerebral cortex, in health and disease. By developing and integrating an array of innovative approaches, his lab has made several important discoveries with implications in developmental neurobiology, but also stem cells, cancer and evolutionary biology. He pioneered the use of pluripotent stem cells to model neural development in vitro and its combination with xenotransplantation to study human neural development in vivo. Over the last ten years, his laboratory has discovered new mechanisms linking development and evolution of the human cerebral cortex, including the roles of human-specific genes in human cortical neuron development and function, and the implication of mitochondria and metabolism in setting the tempo of cortical neuron development.