Dr. Nadav Ahituv

Dr. Ahituv is a Professor in the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences and the Director for 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 also develops massively parallel reporter assays (MPRAs) that allow for high-throughput functional characterization of gene regulatory elements and the use of gene regulatory elements as therapeutic targets. Finally, the lab also utilizes short DNA sequences for diagnostic purposes. Nadav has been a pioneer developing therapeutics using CRISPRa.