Dr. Ajay Chitnis completed his medical training at Grant Medical College, Mumbai in 1983 and then he spent a year at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuroscience in Bangalore, before beginning his graduate work at the University of Michigan in 1985. Under the guidance of Dr. John Kuwada he showed how axon tracts established in the zebrafish brain by early developing neurons serve as a scaffold to guide growth cones of later developing neurons. Then, as a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Chris Kintner from 1991-95 at the Salk Institute, La Jolla CA, he showed that Notch signaling, originally identified in Drosophila, has a conserved role in mediating the process of lateral inhibition and determining when progenitor cells are allowed to differentiate as neurons in the Xenopus CNS. The complexity of trying to understand how the pattern of differentiated neurons emerges as a consequence of cell-cell interactions drew him to agent based programming languages like Netlogo, which he has since used to build computational models of various developmental events in the embryo.
After a second postdoctoral position with Dr. Wolfgang Driever, where he did a genetic screen to identify zebrafish with an aberrant pattern of early neurons, he established his Unit in the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics at NICHD in 1997. The screen led to the identification of an E3 ligase Mib1 as new component of Notch signaling pathway. It also led to the analysis of the headless (Tcf7l1a, previously known as Tcf3a) mutant, which provided insight into mechanisms that divide the nervous system into compartments with distinct fate. Now a tenured Senior Investigator and Head of the Section on Neural Developmental Dynamics, Dr. Chitnis and his team are using a combination of cellular, molecular, genetic, biomechanics and computational approaches to understand how the posterior Lateral Line system is established by the posterior Lateral Line primordium as it migrates from the ear to the tip of the tail periodically depositing neuromasts.
