Wayne Poon, PhD

Wayne is the Head of Neuroscience at Neucyte where he oversees efforts to develop human iPSC-based neurological disease models and functional and phenotypic assays that can be utilized in drug discovery screening platforms to identify novel therapeutic compounds for CNS diseases.

Previously, Wayne worked at Fujifilm Cellular Dynamics and was involved in the identification of unmet needs in the neuroscience field and the development of iPSC-based models for pre-clinical CNS applications. Wayne currently remains affiliated with UC Irvine as an Assistant Research Professor where his research focus is elucidating the molecular mechanisms underlying the genetic risk of Alzheimer disease.

Wayne received his PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from UCLA under the mentorship of Dr. Catherine F. Clarke and carried out his post-doctoral research at UC Irvine with Dr. Carl Cotman focused on Alzheimer disease and mechanisms of neuronal synaptic plasticity.  He has worked on the development of cellular models to identify genotype-phenotype assays with an emphasis on microglia and astrocytes and more recently, the development of complex co-culture model systems to better recapitulate brain cellular phenotypes.