Dr. Jill M. Weimer is a developmental neuroscientist and serves as the senior director of Therapeutic Development at Sanford Research in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. In this role, she helps scientist at Sanford develop strategies to expedite therapy development. Since joining the team at Sanford in 2009, she has also developed a K–12 STEM education program called the Sanford PROMISE, leads an U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded research training program for medical students and helps oversee the Coordination of Rare Diseases at Sanford (CoRDS) program, a free international registry for rare diseases patients.
Dr. Weimer’s research program is centered around understanding the dynamics and differentiation of neural stem cells in the developing brain and how disruption in these processes can lead to a whole host of neural pediatric disorders. Over the last few years her team has focused on development of novel therapeutic strategies for multiple forms of Batten disease as well as the generation of novel porcine models for the study of neurofibromatosis type 1, ataxia telangiectasia, and CLN3–Batten disease. Dr. Weimer received her bachelor’s degree and Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of Rochester. She then completed her postdoctoral training in the Neuroscience Research Center at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill with a focus on developmental neuroscience before joining the team at Sanford.