Scott Soderling serves as the chair of the Department of Cell Biology at Duke University and is the scientific director of the Duke Mouse Transgenic Facility. He received his Ph.D. in pharmacology at the University of Washington, and as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) postdoctoral fellow, he uncovered a new neuronal cytoskeletal signaling complex implicated in intellectual disability that facilitates synaptogenesis.

Soderling’s laboratory studies how neural signaling pathways develop and are organized, and how disruptions in the synaptic connectivity between neurons leads to behavioral deficits such as those seen in intellectual disability, autism, schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease. To help understand the complexity of protein organization in the brain, his laboratory has recently developed a CRISPR-Cas9-based homology-independent universal genome engineering (HiUGE) method for endogenous protein manipulation (Gao et al., Neuron, 2019).