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Dr. Arian is a postdoc in Jessica Young’s lab in the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology at the University of Washington. His research focuses on utilizing human induced pluripotent stem cell (hiPSC) derived neurons and cortical organoids to assess the impact of perturbing signature aging genes’ expression on cell function. Aging genes were identified using explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) techniques on publicly available single cell/single nucleus RNA-seq datasets of the human brain. The identified genes are then introduced to our CRISPR inhibition/CRISPR activation hiPSC cell lines to assess their impact on cell/organoid phenotype. These studies can potentially identify therapeutic targets to ease the burden of aging-related neurodegeneration. Dr. Arian received his Ph. D from the University of Washington in the Department of Pharmaceutics under the mentorship of Dr. Ken Thummel and Dr. Ed Kelly.
