Robert Louis Hastings, PhD

I earned my bachelor’s degree at the University of Texas, where I worked in the lab of George Bittner refining the “PEG Fusion” method of nerve repair to be useful in a clinical setting. I further pursued a career in research by earning my Ph.D. at Texas A&M University in the lab of Wes Thompson, where I developed a passion for the research of Schwann cells, the glia of the peripheral nervous system. In particular, I developed a method of ablating perisynaptic Schwann cells in such a way that I could observe how the neuromuscular junction recovered after such an injury. I decided to conduct my postdoctoral research in the Valdez lab because we are pursuing exciting new opportunities in perisynaptic Schwann cell research.