News

February 2024

New publication out in Nature from the Engreitz Lab and collaborators at the Broad Institute/Brigham and Women’s Hospital. This study developed a Variant-to-Gene-to-Program (V2G2P) to map how genetic variants affect gene expression and how genes impact biological function, and used this approach to uncover mechanisms underlying coronary artery disease risk. Read more in the Broad/BWH press release here


Dr. Casey Gifford was selected as a member of Stanford MCHRI's Inaugural Team Science and Translational Medicine Faculty Development Cohort. She will be leading a project focused on “Identifying gene regulatory networks involved in congenital heart disease amenable to therapeutic intervention”.

 

January 2024

 Two BASE postdocs were awarded the American Heart Association Postdoctoral Fellowship! Congratulations to Dr. Megha Agarwal, postdoc in the Gifford Lab, who was selected for her work on “Understanding left ventricular non-compaction through myocardial-endocardial crosstalk using human cardiac organoid”, and to Dr. Chongyang Zhang, postdoc in the Rabinovitch Lab, studying the “Mechanism underlying pulmonary arterial hypertension induced by reduced SOX17 in congenital heart disease”.

 

 December 2023

Warm welcome to the BASE Program’s newest faculty recruit: Dr. Xiaojie Qiu, who also joined the Departments of Genetics and Computer Science. His laboratory will leverage his unique background in single-cell genomics, mathematical modeling, and machine learning to bridge the gap between “big data” from single-cell/spatial genomics and quantitative/predictive modeling in order to address fundamental questions in mammalian cell fate transitions, especially those of heart evolution, development, and disease. Check out more on his lab website here.

 

BASE is honoring Betty Irene Moore, who passed away on December 12, 2023. Her transformative donation to the Lucile Packard Foundation in 2017 established the Betty Irene Moore Children’s Heart Center and enabled the launch of our Basic Science and Engineering (BASE) Program to find a cure for children's heart disease through discovery and innovation. This generous donation led to the recruitment and support of our four world-class scientists currently building an interdisciplinary program in bioengineering, stem cell biology, genetics and computer science. Read more about her legacy here.

 

November 2023

 We are excited to announce that our Director Dr. Marlene Rabinovitch is the recipient of the prestigious American Heart Association 2023 Research Achievement Award, celebrating her monumental discoveries in the treatment of Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension. Congrats, Marlene!

 

September 2023

Congratulations to Dr. Mark Skylar-Scott and his large multidisciplinary team of Investigators at Stanford University for their Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) award to bioprint full-scale functional human hearts! Read more about the HEART project here.

 

Dr. Jesse Engreitz, Dr. Anshul Kundaje, and Dr. Xiaojie Qiu were selected to lead a Data Analysis and Validation Center for the NIH MorPhiC Consortium, which aims to develop a consistent catalog of molecular and cellular phenotypes for null alleles for every human gene by using in-vitro multicellular systems.

 

May 2023

Congratulations to our BASE PhD students selected as 2023 Stanford Bio-X Fellows! Danielle Klinger (Bioengineering) from the Skylar-Scott Lab will work on “Engineering organoid models of early cardiac developmental stages” and Benjamin Doughty (Genetics) from the Engreitz and Greenleaf Labs will focus on “Deciphering the mechanisms of non-coding genetic variation in enhancers”. 

 

April 2023 

Gifford Lab undergraduate researcher Ximena Sanchez featured in the Stanford Report story on “what it means – and what it takes – to lead”. Read the article here.

 

March 2023

BASE students are among the prestigious National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellows! Gifford Lab Stem Cell PhD student Julie Sanchez will study “Investigating Cardiac Neural Crest Cell Dysfunction in Heart Development”. Skylar-Scott Lab undergraduate student Alana Mermin-Bunnell – a senior in Stanford Bioengineering – also received the NSF GRFP award. Congrats Julie & Alana!

 

New publication out from Dr. Marlene Rabinovitch’s lab! Dr. Lingli Wang led a research project entitled “Dysregulated Smooth Muscle Cell BMPR2–ARRB2 Axis Causes Pulmonary Hypertension”, which provides important insights into how to potentially prevent or reverse the progression of pulmonary arterial hypertension. Read more about the study in the press release here and the publication in Circulation Research.

 

January 2023

Two BASE postdocs were awarded the American Heart Association + Children’s Heart Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship! Congrats to Dr. Nirmal Vadgama from the Gifford Lab whose project will focus on “Defining the neural crest's role in CHD and associated comorbidities using single-cell epigenomics and deep learning” & to Dr. Dulguun Amgalan from the Engreitz Lab whose project on “Regulatory maps of endothelial cell differentiation to connect congenital heart disease risk variants to function” was renewed!