Dr. Alison Goate is a Project PI. Dr. Goate is the Willard T.C. Johnson Research Professor of Neurogenetics and Director of the Ronald M. Loeb Center for Alzheimer’s disease. She is a member of the Friedman Brain Institute (FBI), Black Family Stem Cell Institute (BFSCI) and the Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology (IGMB). She has worked on the genetics of dementias for over 30 years.
Dr. Daniel Geschwind is a Project PI. Dr. Geschwind is the Gordon and Virginia MacDonald Distinguished Chair Human Genetics, Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry, and Senior Associate Dean and Associate Vice Chancellor of Precision Health at UCLA. He has extensive experience in the production and analysis of genomic data and understanding of neurodegenerative diseases. He has led several large-scale genetics/genomics projects in tauopathies and performed several published studies analyzing chromatin conformation (e.g. HiC and ATAC-seq) and single cell genomic methods.
Dr. Martin Kampmann is a Project PI. Dr. Kampmann is an assistant professor at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Kampmann’s lab is at the forefront of developing technologies to perturb gene function in a wide range of biological systems. Dr. Kampmann co-developed a genetic screening platform that exploits catalytically dead Cas9 (dCas9) to recruit transcriptional repressors or activators to endogenous genes to enable inducible and reversible repression (CRISPRi) and activation (CRISPRa) of genes in human cells, enabling genome-wide loss- and gain-of-function screens. This screening platform is based on a quantitative framework for massively parallel screens they had previously developed for RNA interference-based screens. Importantly, CRISPRi overcomes the problem of off-target effects that has plagued RNAi-based approaches, resulting in high specificity while maintaining high sensitivity.