Biography
Nadav Ahituv is a Professor in the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences and the Interim Director of the Institute for Human Genetics at the University of California, San Francisco. He received his PhD in human genetics from Tel-Aviv University working on hereditary hearing loss. He then did his postdoc, specializing in functional genomics, in the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the DOE Joint Genome Institute. His current work is focused on identifying gene regulatory elements and linking nucleotide variation within them to various phenotypes including morphological differences between species, drug response and human disease. His lab was one of the co-developers of massively parallel reporter assays (MPRAs) that allow for high-throughput functional characterization of gene regulatory elements and pioneered the use of gene regulatory elements as therapeutic targets. Finally, the lab also utilizes short DNA sequences for diagnostic purposes.
Track Co-Chairs:
Yael Weiss, Mahzi
Peter Marks, FDA