Sundari Chetty

Sundari Chetty is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and the Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine in Stanford, California. She received her B.A. in molecular and cell biology and Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of California, Berkeley. After completing her postdoctoral work in Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology at Harvard University in Douglas Melton’s laboratory, she started her independent lab at Stanford University in 2016.

Dr. Chetty’s scientific interests have been to understand the mechanisms controlling cell proliferation and cell fate specification during development and disease. The overarching goal of her research program is to understand these mechanisms to more effectively differentiate human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) into desired cell types for cell replacement therapy and disease modeling. Using a wide range of techniques, including RNA-sequencing, ChIP-sequencing, and ATAC-sequencing, Dr. Chetty’s lab has developed simple tools to prime pluripotent stem cells into a state competent for differentiation and subsequently enhance their differentiation into specialized cell types for therapeutic applications. The knowledge gained from these studies is applied in Dr. Chetty's lab for applications in disease modeling, especially in relation to neurodegenerative and psychiatric disorders.

Along with colleagues at the University of California, Davis MIND Institute, Dr. Chetty was awarded an NIH-funded Autism Centers of Excellence grant in 2017 to investigate the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying autism spectrum disorder using hPSCs.