Dr. Juan Pascual, MD, PhD

Juan M. Pascual is a physician and scientist with expertise in unusual diseases primarily involving - but not limited to - the nervous and muscular systems and, as a researcher, in experimental neural science.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. 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 medical degree with distinction from the Universidad de Granada in 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, McCollum Professor and Chair. …His postdoctoral research was conducted in the laboratory of Arthur Karlin, 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 under James P. Keating, W. McKim Marriott, MD, Chair in Pediatrics and Philip R. Dodge, former Pediatrics Chair, and trained in Neurology and Pediatric Neurology under Darryl C. De Vivo, Sidney Carter Professor of Neurology and Marc C. Patterson, Director of Pediatric Neurology at the Neurological Institute of New York - Columbia University Medical Center.Following study with Peter Hacker, St. John's College, Oxford, and Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford, United Kingdom, Dr. Pascual is also part of the department of Philosophy of Cornell University as affiliate faculty member.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 and about 100 scientific journal articles. 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  5th edition published in 2015 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 book, provisionally entitled Philosophical Foundations of Neurology, 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 and in multi-organ disorders. He has expertise in complex diagnostic problems, second opinions for patients visiting from the rest of the nation and abroad, novel treatment development for some individuals for whom there has been no satisfactory therapy, and clinical trials when they are based on strong scientific principles.Links:Recent clinical research studies Recent NIH-funded research projects  Publications