Juan Pascual, MD, PhD

Prior to joining Weill Cornell and NewYork-Presbyterian, Dr. Pascual was the inaugural holder of The Once Upon a Time Foundation Professorship in Pediatric Neurologic Diseases and the holder of the Ed and Sue Rose Distinguished Professorship in Neurology at The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, where he remains an adjunct professor of Neurology. He is also adjunct professor of Bioengineering at the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science at The University of Texas at Dallas.

Dr. Pascual received his MD degree with distinction from the Universidad de Granada, Spain, one of the oldest universities in the world, founded in 1349. He received his PhD degree in Molecular Physiology and Biophysics from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, under Arthur M. Brown, MD, PhD (1932 - 2021), McCollum Professor and Chair. His postdoctoral research was conducted in the laboratory of Arthur Karlin, PhD (1936 - 2024), Higgins Professor and Director of the Center for Molecular Recognition, College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University and, later, at the Colleen Giblin Research Laboratories for Pediatric Neurology at the same institution under a Neurological Sciences Academic Development Award from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS). He also received residency training in Pediatrics at Washington University School of Medicine - St. Louis Children's Hospital and in Neurology and Pediatric Neurology at the Neurological Institute of New York - Columbia University Medical Center.

His laboratory research, mostly funded by NINDS, spans virtually the entire field of neuroscience, including medical neuroscience, from molecular structure and function (including drug action) to neural physiology and metabolism at the cellular, circuit and whole-brain level and neurogenetics, all of which is complemented with human studies and clinical trials. Research greatly influences his clinical activities and patient observations guide his research. His laboratory is home to scientists from very diverse backgrounds and levels of training who have joined efforts to endow both neurology and developmental medicine with a strong scientific basis.

Dr. Pascual has co-authored several dozen scientific and medical textbooks. He is the editor, together with Dr. Roger Rosenberg, of the leading text Rosenberg's Molecular and Genetic Basis of Neurological and Psychiatric Disease (from the 2015 5th edition to the present one, which comprises over 2,000 pages). He is also the author of the textbook Progressive Brain Disorders in Childhood (Cambridge University Press). He is now working on a new philosophy book, provisionally entitled Sense & Nonsense in Medical Neuroscience: Inference & Fallacy, to be published also by Cambridge University Press.

As a clinician, Dr. Pascual specializes in genetic and metabolic diseases of the nervous and neuromuscular systems of infants, children and adults with emphasis on complex diagnostic problems, second opinions for patients visiting from the rest of the nation and abroad, and clinical trials.

Following study with Dr. Peter Hacker, he also joined the department of philosophy at Cornell University as affiliate faculty member.

Links:

Recent clinical research studies

Recent NIH-funded research projects

Publications