Viviana Gradinaru

Viviana Grădinaru is a Romanian-American neuroscientist who is a professor of neuroscience and biological engineering at the California Institute of Technology. She develops neurotechnologies, including optogenetics CLARITY tissue clearing, and gene delivery vectors. She has been awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers and the National Institutes of Health Director's Pioneer Award. In 2019 she was a finalist for the Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists. In 2020 she was awarded a Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science by the Vilcek Foundation.

Early life and education Gradinaru is a native of Vaslui, Romania, and grew up with her grandparents in a small village. As a native of Eastern Europe, Gradinaru was encouraged to study science from a young age, and took part in science olympiads. During her undergraduate studies, she became fascinated by neurodegeneration. She moved to Stanford University for her doctoral studies, where she specialized in neuroscience performing research with Karl Deisseroth. She took part in ballroom dancing and competed in quickstep at an amateur level throughout graduate school. Gradinaru joined the faculty at the California Institute of Technology, as an assistant professor in 2012 and was promoted to full professor in 2018. Since 2013, she has served as the Principal Investigator of the CLARITY, Optogenetics and Vector Engineering Research (CLOVER) Center at the California Institute of Technology.

Gradinaru has worked on the development of novel technologies for brain imaging, which she uses to understand sleep disorders and movement. Optogenetics make use of light and photosensitive proteins to manipulate the function of cells that live within heterogenous body tissue.

She looks to use her understanding of neuronal activity to establish the mechanism of action of deep brain stimulation (DBS). In particular, she has used optogenetics to study the brain circuitry involved with Parkinson's disease. Using CLARITY, Gradinaru looks to create anatomical maps of intact brain networks and biological systems. In 2019, Gradinaru was part of a research team that demonstrated that zebrafish and mice need serotonin to sleep.

Awards and honours 2013 World Economic Forum Young Scientist 2013 Pew Scholar 2014 Cell's 40 Under 40 2018 The Gill Center for Biomolecular Science at Indiana University Transformative Investigator Award 2018 National Institutes of Health Director's Pioneer Award 2020 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science, Vilcek Foundation

Publications