Giorgia Quadrato’s laboratory focuses on understanding the cellular and molecular basis of human brain development and disease. They aim to improve emerging brain-region specific models of the human brain, including pluripotent stem cell-derived 3-D organoids and human chimeric mice and to combine them with large-scale single-cell omics technologies to: (i) study how cell-cell interactions affect the establishment of functional circuits during human brain development; (ii) investigate how perturbation of neuronal activity affects cell-cell and cell-extracellular matrix interactions in distinct neural subtypes; (iii) understand how cell-type-specific cellular programs that control activity-dependent cell-cell interactions are disrupted in neurodevelopmental disorders; and (iv) explore the potential neurodevelopmental origins of neurodegenerative disorders, focusing on the selective vulnerability of distinct neural cell types.