Nicolás DeRuiter

Originally from San José, California, Nico is a hop, skip, and a jump away from home at Stanford. He earned a B.S. in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology (MCDB), as well as in Literature and Comparative Cultures, from Yale College, graduating in 2020. As an undergraduate, Nico conducted his senior thesis intensive in MCDB in Dr. Junjie Guo's lab at the Yale School of Medicine, studying the sequence determinants of familial amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD), a pair of related neurodegenerative disorders.

 

At the Tessier-Lavigne Lab, Nico works to understand how axons die. In particular, Nico studies the molecular mechanism of Wallerian degeneration, a programmed form of axon self-destruction that occurs upon traumatic injury as well as in degenerative disease.

 

Outside the lab, Nico is an avid cyclist, a piano man, and a slowpoke.