Arnold Kriegstein is the John Bowes Distinguished Professor in Stem Cell and Tissue Biology and founding director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). He is also a member of the National Academy of Medicine.

Kriegstein received his B.A. from Yale University and his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from New York University in 1977. He subsequently completed residency training in neurology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston Children’s Hospital and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (teaching hospitals of Harvard Medical School). He has held academic appointments at Stanford University, Yale University and Columbia University. In 2004, he joined the Department of Neurology at UCSF.

His research focuses on the way in which neural stem and progenitor cells in the embryonic brain produce neurons and ways in which this information can be used for cell-based therapies to treat diseases of the nervous system. His lab found that radial glial cells are neuronal stem cells in the developing brain and identified a second type of precursor cell produced by radial glial cells that is responsible for generating specific neuronal subtypes. He has recently begun to characterize the progenitor cells within the developing human brain, where he discovered a novel radial glia subtype that contributes to the huge expansion of neuron number that characterizes the human cerebral cortex.