Alexandros Poulopoulos, PhD

• University of Athens, Greece, BSc in Biology, 2003
• University of Göttingen, Germany, PhD in  Neuroscience, 2008
• Max Planck Institute for Experimental Medicine, Germany, Postdoc, 2009
• Massachusetts General Hospital, Postdoc (EMBO fellow), 2012
• Harvard University, Postdoc (HFSP fellow) and Research Associate, 2016

Our team combines synthetic biology with developmental neuroscience to generate molecular therapeutics for neurogenetic disease. We develop new precision CRISPR agents, like Cas9-RC, with the ability to edit somatic genomes in vivo. 

With this new generation of genome-editing agents, we study the basic science behind a spectrum of brain conditions spanning epilepsy, autism, schizophrenia, and neurdegeneration, and use this knowledge to develop molecular therapeutics aiming to restore the underlying genomic lesions.

For more on the lab and our research, see poulab.org

cortical development; synaptogenesis; cell adhesion; mTOR; Neuroligin; epilepsy; autism; schizophrenia, neurodegeneration, CRISPR; in utero electroporation

Brandenburg C, Crutcher GW, Romanowski AJ, Donofrio SG, Duraine LR, Owusu-Mensah RNA, Cooper BH, Sugihara I, Blatt GJ, Sillitoe RV, Poulopoulos A. Developmental transformations of Purkinje cells tracked by DNA electrokinetic mobility. (2025) Cell Rep Methods, 5(9), 101143.

Robertson CD, Richardson RR, Steyert M, Martin CA, Flynn C, Poulopoulos A. Prime Editing of Mouse Primary Neurons. (2025) Methods Mol Biol, 2910:221-238.

Altas B, Tuffy LP, Patrizi A, Dimova K, Soykan T, Brandenburg C, Romanowski AJ, Robertson CD, Khim SN, Bunce GW, Ambrozkiewicz MC, Yagensky O, Krueger-Burg D, Hammer M, Hsiao HH, Laskowski PR, Dyck L, Puche AC, Sassoè-Pognetto M, Chua JJE, Urlaub H, Jahn O, Brose N, Poulopoulos A. Region-Specific Phosphorylation Determines Neuroligin-3 Localization at Excitatory versus Inhibitory Synapses. (2024) Biol Psychiatry, 96(10):815-828.

Ament SA & Poulopoulos A. The Brain’s Dark Transcriptome: Sequencing RNA in distal compartments of neurons and glia. (2023)Curr Opin Neurobiol,81:102725

Altas B, Romanowski AJ, Bunce G, Poulopoulos A. Neuronal mTOR Outposts: Implications for Translation, Signaling, and Plasticity. (2022) Front. Cell. Neurosci. doi: 10.3389/fncel.2022.853634

Richardson RR, Steyert M, Khim SN, Crutcher GW, Brandenburg C, Robertson C, Romanowski AJ, Inen J, Altas B, Poulopoulos A. Enhancing precision and efficiency of Cas9-mediated knockin through combinatorial fusions of DNA repair proteins. (2023) CRISPR J, 6(5):447-461

Poulopoulos A, Murphy AJ,  Ozkan A, Davis P, Hatch J, Kirchner R, Macklis JD. Subcellular transcriptomes and proteomes of developing axon projections in the cerebral cortex. (2019) Nature, (7739):356-360.