Research Theme:
Cellular & Molecular Engineering,Research Interests:
Synthetic neurobiology, genome engineering, brain gene regulation, enhancers, single cell genomics, molecular recording, mechanisms of learning and memory, neurodevelopmental disorders, multiple sclerosis, cell and gene therapies
Biography:
Dr. Troy A. McDiarmid is an Assistant Professor in the School of Biomedical Engineering and Full Member of the Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health at the University of British Columbia. He completed his PhD in Neuroscience at UBC. He then completed a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship with Dr. Jay Shendure at the University of Washington, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology before beginning his current role at UBC. The McDiarmid Lab develops scalable synthetic neurobiology technologies to map, manipulate, and record gene regulation in the brain, with the ultimate goal of understanding and treating disorders of neurodevelopment and the neural immune system. Work includes the development and application of single-cell CRISPR screening approaches to identify DNA sequences regulating gene expression in different cell types and states, and molecular recording methods that write cellular events into the genome itself, enabling reconstruction of past biological processes.