Dr. James Crowe

Dr. James Crowe

Y13-K-24

James grew up in London, England and began his academic journey with a BSc in Biological Sciences at Queen Mary University of London. Fascinated his project elucidating the starfish neuroendocrine system using RNA in situ hybridisation, he pursued an MSc in Neuroscience at King’s College London. It was during his research and subsequent industrial internship in Deepak Srivastava’s lab he studied human brain organoids as a model system for imaging intact, cleared tissues with an Airy-beam light sheet microscope – work that sparked a lasting passion for building human brain models to investigate disease.

From 2016 to 2020, James completed his PhD in Rhein Parri’s lab at Aston University as part of the Horizon 2020 FET-Open “Meso-Brain” project, which advanced nanoscale 3D-printed scaffolds for human brain modelling. As an independent research project he interrogated neuron–astrocyte signalling during early cortical oscillations in a human in vitro model, combining multi-electrode arrays with calcium imaging to record network dynamics.

After receiving his PhD in 2021, James moved to Lund, Sweden to join the Canals Lab at the Lund Stem Cell Centre, where he generated genome-edited isogenic human iPSC lines and subsequent brain organoid models of Gaucher disease, a genetic childhood dementia, to study early disease progression during neurodevelopment. In 2024, he joined the Children’s Research Centre (FZK) and URRP ITINERARE at the University of Zurich where he was awarded a UZH Postdoctoral Fellowship to continue this work. Inspired by this work, James has now joined the Bachmann lab as part of the URRP AdaBD to investigate autism spectrum disorder using human iPSC-derived brain models.