Background - Dr. Persson

After completing a Master of Science in biochemistry at University of Gothenburg, Sweden, Dr Persson became interested in neural stem cell biology and joined late Professor Peter Eriksson’s laboratory to study human and rodent neural stem cells. As a PhD student at the Institute of Clinical Neuroscience and Physiology at University of Gothenburg, Dr. Persson studied how exercise, enriched environment, stress, and opioids regulate self-renewal and cell fate determination in neural progenitors isolated from rat hippocampus. In 2004, Dr. Persson established a brain tumor research group to study stem cell-like tumor cells in human brain tumors. In 2004-05, the laboratory collected tumor tissue from 69 human brain tumors in a biobank. To gain more knowledge in brain tumor biology, Dr. Persson completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Professor William Weiss at the Department of Neurology, UCSF (2005-2008). Dr. Persson was then promoted to Assistant Adjunct Professor and continued his collaboration with Dr. Weiss. In 2012, Dr. Persson was promoted to Assistant Professor In-Residence and established his laboratory at the Sandler Neuroscience Building at Department of Neurology, UCSF.