Professor Derek van der Kooy is a distinguished faculty member in Molecular Genetics with a PhD. He is affiliated with the Terrence Donnelly Centre for Cellular & Biomedical Research at the University of Toronto in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. His extensive research interests encompass behavior and mental illness, bioinformatics and computational biology, developmental biology, disease models, neurodegeneration and neurodevelopment, optogenetics, regenerative medicine and tissue engineering, stem cell biology, and more. The van der Kooy lab is involved in a wide range of stem cell biology and developmental biology research, with a focus on stem cells in various organisms, from Drosophila to humans. They have made significant contributions to the understanding of neural stem cells in the adult mammalian eye and have isolated rare stem cells from the mouse and human pancreas. Additionally, the lab investigates neural circuits related to motivation, psychoactive drug addiction, and genes associated with learning and memory in C. elegans and mice.