Corey Harwell

Corey C. Harwell is an American neuroscientist who is an assistant professor in the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School.

Career Harwell initially planned on pursuing a career in medicine, an early research experience in Cori Bargmann's laboratory led Harwell instead to the basic sciences and in particular to neurobiology. As a graduate student, Harwell conducted his thesis research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under Elly Nedivi. He studied the role of the gene cpg15 (candidate plasticity gene 15) and its protein product in neural development and plasticity. Cpg15 had been found to be a target of intracellular signaling pathways important for synaptic plasticity. Increases in cpg15 expression caused changes in axon and dendrite growth, as well as synapse formation. Harwell and his colleague Ulrich Putz showed that expression of a soluble form of CPG15 promoted survival of cortical neuron progenitors in early brain development. Additionally, Harwell characterized the relationship between cell lineage and distribution of developing cortical interneuron circuits and found that cell lineage does not determine clustering of cortical interneurons

Following his postdoctoral work, Harwell became an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School in the Department of Neurobiology. In 2021, his laboratory moved to the University of California, San Francisco. His laboratory continues to focus on neural development.

Research The Harwell Lab investigates how the developmental origins and lineages of different neuron types affects their function in the adult brain.