1. Pasko Rakic is a Yugoslav-born American neuroscientist, who presently works in the Yale School of Medicine Department of Neuroscience in New Haven, Connecticut.
17 Facts About Pasko Rakic
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Pasko Rakic was the founder and served as Chairman of the Department of Neurobiology at Yale, and was founder and Director of the Kavli Institute for Neuroscience.
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Pasko Rakic is best known for elucidating the mechanisms involved in development and evolution of the cerebral cortex.
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In 2008, Rakic shared the inaugural Kavli Prize in Neuroscience.
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Pasko Rakic is currently the Dorys McConell Duberg Professor of Neuroscience, leads an active research laboratory, and serves on Advisory Boards and Scientific Councils of a number of Institutions and Research Foundations.
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Pasko Rakic's mother, Juliana Todoric, of Serbian and Slovakian descent was born in Dubrovnik and moved to Ruma, where they met and got married in 1929.
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Finally, their daughter, Vera, and son, Pasko Rakic, completed Gimnasium in the town of Sremska Mitrovica.
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Vera eventually graduated in mathematics from Belgrade University, and Pasko Rakic obtained his medical degree from the University of Belgrade School of Medicine, where he embarked on a career as a neurosurgeon.
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Pasko Rakic then accepted a faculty position at Harvard Medical School, where he worked and taught for eight years.
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In 1978, Pasko Rakic was recruited by George Palade to join the faculty of Yale University, where he founded and served as Chair of the Department of Neurobiology and the director of the Kavli Institute for Neuroscience.
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Pasko Rakic was president of the Society for Neuroscience from 1995 to 1996.
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Pasko Rakic is known for his studies of the development and evolution of the brain.
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Pasko Rakic injected the monkeys' fetuses with radioactive thymidine at a particular time after conception.
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Pasko Rakic discovered the early commitment of newborn neurons to their laminar, radial and areal fates and proposed differential cell adhesion as the basic mechanism for their surface-mediating migration along transient radial glial scaffolding.
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Pasko Rakic provided direct cellular evidence for the competitive interactions among binocular visual connections before birth, and showed that axons, synapses and neurotransmitter receptors are overproduced before declining to the adult levels by a process of competitive selective elimination.
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Pasko Rakic is known for failing to identify adult neurogenesis in the primate cerebral cortex.
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Previously, he was married to Patricia Goldman-Pasko Rakic, a pioneering neuroscientist, who died on July 31,2003.