Pasko Rakic

Rakic discovered the early commitment of newborn neurons to their laminar, radial and areal fates and proposed differential cell adhesion as the basic mechanism for their surface-mediating migration along transient radial glial scaffolding. These studies led him to postulate the "radial unit hypothesis" and "protomap" hypotheses of cortical development and evolution that provide the framework for understanding basic principles of normal and pathological development of the human brain. These concept were further elaborated in his paper published in the journal Neuron in 2013.

Pasko Rakic (Croatian: Paško Rakić, Serbian Cyrillic: Пашко Ракић) is a Yugoslav-born American neuroscientist, who presently works in the Yale School of Medicine Department of Neuroscience in New Haven, Connecticut. His main research interest is in the development and evolution of the human brain. He was the founder and served as Chairman of the Department of Neurobiology at Yale, and was founder and Director of the Kavli Institute for Neuroscience. He is best known for elucidating the mechanisms involved in development and evolution of the cerebral cortex. In 2008, Rakic shared the inaugural Kavli Prize in Neuroscience. He is currently the Dorys McConell Duberg Professor of Neuroscience, leads an active research laboratory, and serves on Advisory Boards and Scientific Councils of a number of Institutions and Research Foundations.

He is married to Sandra Biller. Previously, he was married to Patricia Goldman-Rakic (née Shoer), also a neuroscientist, who died on July 31, 2003.

He then accepted a faculty position at Harvard Medical School, where he worked and taught for eight years. In 1978, he was recruited by George Palade to Yale University, where he founded and served as Chair of the Department of Neurobiology and the director of the Kavli Institute for Neuroscience until 2015, when he returned to work full-time on his research projects, funded by US Public Health Services and various private foundations. He was president of the Society for Neuroscience from 1995 to 1996.

His research career began in 1962, with a Fulbright Fellowship at Harvard University in Boston, MA, where he met professor Paul Yakovlev, who introduced him to the joy of studying human brain development, which inspired him to abandon neurosurgery. In 1966, he returned to Belgrade and obtained his graduate degree in Developmental Biology and Genetics in 1969. During work on his doctoral thesis, Rakic made his first significant discovery that was internationally recognized.

Rakic was born on May 15, 1933, in Ruma (formerly Kingdom of Yugoslavia). His father, Toma Rakić, was Croatian, originally from Pula (Istria, at that time part of Italy), but emigrated to Yugoslavia, where in the town of Novi Sad (Bačka) he studied to become an accountant and tax official. His mother, Juliana Todorić, of Serbian and Slovakian descent was born in Dubrovnik (Dalmatia) and moved to Ruma, where they met and got married in 1929.