Agnete Kirkeby, PhD, is an Associate Professor and group leader at the Department of Neuroscience at University of Copenhagen (Denmark) and at the Wallenberg Center for Regenerative Medicine at Lund University (Sweden). Agnete and her group has unique expertise in using human pluripotent stem cells for production of subtype-specific neural cells, and has developed protocols for accurate patterning of neural cells toward different regional fates as well as complex in vitro models of the early human brain development (Rifes et al., Nat. Biotechnol. 2020). This work has further led to the development of a promising dopamine neuron cell replacement therapy for Parkinson’s Disease, which is expected to enter clinical trials in 2021 (Grealish et al., Cell Stem Cell 2014, Nolbrant et al., Nature Protocols 2017). In this project, the Kirkeby group will be applying complex stem cell models to study the causes of the underlying brain inflammation in PD.