Kavli ScholarLoyal A. Goff

Loyal A. Goff investigates how neural cell types are specified and how these decisions are organized in space and time as brains are built. His laboratory develops custom single-cell and spatial transcriptomics assays for challenging tissue and organism contexts, and applies them across comparative systems including the vertebrate retina, the enteric nervous system, and most recently, the cephalopod brain. This work led to the discovery of a novel neurogenic tissue outside the central nervous system in adult cephalopods that continuously generates neurons which migrate into and integrate with the central brain. With Kavli Scholar support, his group is defining how these neurons are specified, how they reach their integration targets, and whether they become functional circuit elements, while establishing an in vitro system for mechanistic studies of cephalopod neurogenesis.

Dr. Goff earned his Ph.D. in Cell Biology and Neuroscience from Rutgers University under Dr. Ron Hart, where he studied microRNA regulation of neural stem cell differentiation. He completed postdoctoral training in computational biology with Dr. Manolis Kellis at MIT and in noncoding RNA biology and neurodevelopment with Dr. John Rinn at Harvard. He joined the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine as an Assistant Professor in 2014 and is now Associate Professor of Neuroscience and Genetic Medicine, Director of the Johns Hopkins Single Cell Training and Analysis Center, and an Associate Member of the Kavli Neurodiscovery Institute.

Dr. Goff has been recognized as a Whitman Fellow of the Marine Biological Laboratory (2024) and a Jerome L. Greene Foundation Scholar (2023). He develops open-source experimental and computational tools for transcriptomic analysis and works to bring single-cell and spatial genomics to organisms that have traditionally been out of reach for these methods.