Juergen Knoblich is deputy scientific director at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (IMBA) and Professor at the Medical University in Vienna. Originally trained as a Drosophila researcher, his research focuses on the development of the human brain and the study of neurodevelopmental disorders. He received his PhD from the University of Tübingen and postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Lily and Yuh-Nung Jan at UCSF, San Francisco. In 2013, the Knoblich group has established cerebral organoids, a groundbreaking new technology that allows reconstitution of human brain development starting from patient iPS cells at unprecedented detail. They have used this system for modelling various neurodevelopmental disorders human brain tissue. They were able to screen through entire sets of disease genes relevant for autism spectrum disorders and could demonstrate that neurodevelopmental disorders can arise from cell types not found in animal models.