Sudha Guttikonda, MD, PhD, was born in India and immigrated to the United States at the age of five with her family. She grew up in northern Virginia. In high school, she worked in Dr. Chi Hon Lee’s lab at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), where she studied visual circuitry in fruit flies. She attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and earned a Bachelor of Science in Biology in 2013. At MIT, she worked in Dr. Troy Littleton’s lab, studying an autism-associated gene in fruit flies. After graduating, she attended the Tri-Institutional MD-PhD program at Weill Cornell Medicine, The Rockefeller University, and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC). She completed her PhD in neuroscience, and worked in Dr. Lorenz Studer’s lab at MSKCC, engineering a human stem cell derived model of neuroinflammation in vitro. Dr. Guttikonda is interested in using human pluripotent stem cells to study the cellular and molecular underpinnings of schizophrenia, particularly dopamine receptors and dopamine processing, as well as the role of inflammation in disease pathogenesis. She is currently interested in using human stem cell models to study psychiatric disease.
