Viviana Gradinaru, professor of neuroscience and biological engineering at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, has been named as a recipient of the Vilcek Foundation Prize for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science. The award recognizes exceptional early to mid-career immigrant biomedical scientists.
Dr. Gradinaru is a Heritage Medical Research Institute Investigator and director of the Center for Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience at the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience at Caltech. Her research focuses on deep brain stimulation procedures for treating human neurodegenerative disorders.
Born to factory workers in Vaslui in northeastern Romania and raised in a farming community under a communist regime, Gradinaru developed an interest in engineering early on in life. She became interested in physics in high school and pursued undergraduate study in physics at the University of Bucharest.
Dr. Gradinaru is a graduate of the California Institute of Technology. She earned a Ph.D. from Stanford University.