Dr. Sheridan has over 20 years of research experience focused on the large-scale generation, expansion, characterization and differentiation of pluripotent and multipotent stem cells and their application in basic research, disease modeling and drug discovery. As a Principal Investigator and Director of the Platform for Cellular Modeling in Neuropsychiatric Disease at Massachusetts General Hospital and Lecturer in the Dept. of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, his efforts have been focused on understanding neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders through the scaled derivation and characterization of human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), iPSC-derived neural stem/progenitor cells, differentiated neurons, microglia and astrocytes from patients of various disease backgrounds to facilitate the study of disease mechanisms and screening of potential therapeutics using cell-based assays.
He has successfully established protocols and procedures to generate large bioreactor-scale quantities of neural stem/progenitor populations, differentiated neurons, astrocytes, and microglia from human iPSC lines in genetically engineered and disease backgrounds, which has made possible large-scale phenotypic and functional characterization studies as well as the development of robust assays amenable to high-throughput screening.
He received his Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics at the University of California, Irvine and followed up with a post-doctoral fellowship in genetic engineering at Harvard University.