Merve Heinzer-Avar
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merveavar.bsky.social
Merve Heinzer-Avar
@merveavar.bsky.social
SNSF Postdoctoral Fellow | Pasca Lab at Stanford neurodegeneration and development, organoids, high-throughput screening
Reposted by Merve Heinzer-Avar
Consider joining us at Stanford as a postdoctoral fellow!

If you have a published paper or a preprint, will graduate in the next period, and are excited to work in California, email me your CV and a brief statement of your research interests and trajectory by the end of August.
August 13, 2025 at 10:09 PM
Grateful to have been part of this work from the Pasca Lab, now published in Nature Biomedical Engineering, on scalable brain organoid production for screening. An early step in a fast-evolving field — and I’m eager to see how things continue to unfold.

Story here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Scalable production of human cortical organoids using a biocompatible polymer - Nature Biomedical Engineering
Addition of an inexpensive, biocompatible polymer reduces spontaneous fusions of organoids in culture.
www.nature.com
July 12, 2025 at 9:31 AM
Reposted by Merve Heinzer-Avar
This week we welcome on campus 2025 class of students for our hands-on Stanford Brain Organogenesis course.
With students joining from across the globe, this is our most international class yet—diving into cutting-edge neural #organoid and #assembloid methods, ready to bring them back to their labs.
May 7, 2025 at 4:46 PM
Reposted by Merve Heinzer-Avar
@stanford.edu Stanford Brain Organogenesis Workshop off to a great start with introduction lectures and tissue culture with @sergiuppasca.bsky.social @stanfordbrain.bsky.social
May 6, 2025 at 4:16 PM
Second day of 2025 Stanford Brain Organogenesis is on full steam! 🚂 @rebeccalevymdphd.bsky.social @sergiuppasca.bsky.social @brainorganogenesis.bsky.social
May 6, 2025 at 4:49 PM
Reposted by Merve Heinzer-Avar
In @nature.com today we report sensory #assembloids comprising four parts to recapitulate aspects of the pathway that processes pain stimuli and we use it to study genetic syndromes.
Work pioneered by the brilliant Ji-il Kim & Kent Imaizumi in close collab with @gregscherrer.bsky.social !
Link 👇
April 9, 2025 at 5:52 PM
Reposted by Merve Heinzer-Avar
Reposted by Merve Heinzer-Avar
Great to see our paper online!

Amazing collaboration with Neal over the years, with lots of help from others in the Pasca group.
Today we report in 𝘾𝙚𝙡𝙡 𝙎𝙩𝙚𝙢 𝘾𝙚𝙡𝙡 a systematic approach to generate neural #organoids resembling various domains of the neural axis
Neal Amin & @kevinkelley.bsky.social developed a multiplexed morphogen screen to generate #organoids that mapped to almost 2/3 of the clusters in the 1st trimester CNS
December 6, 2024 at 9:28 PM
Reposted by Merve Heinzer-Avar
Deadline approaching fast for our free, hands-on workshop on human stem cell models.

This year with a focus on assays & #assembloids for disease modeling.

Join us on the beautiful Stanford campus

Course organized by the amazing Rebecca Levy and @merveavar.bsky.social!
December 5, 2024 at 12:30 AM
Reposted by Merve Heinzer-Avar
Applications are open for our Stanford Brain Organogenesis course in 2025!

This has gotten more and more competitive and we generally get many hundreds of applications for the 20 or so spots. Please note that the committee gives a lot of attention to the motivation letter!
November 21, 2024 at 12:29 AM