Kiana Aran
Keck Graduate Insitute
Seminar Information
Winner of the Nature Research Awards 2021 Scientific Achievement category, Professor Kiana Aran’s research merges biology and nanotechnology to identify biomolecules in real-time. Dr. Aran develops groundbreaking technological tools to improve human life, like the world’s first DNA Search Engine which is built on her CRISPR-Chip invention. Dr. Aran and her team are engineering next-generation nanoelectronic tools to develop solutions for advancing basic and translational research. Her passion lies in developing nanoelectronic devices that have enhanced electrical, chemical, and biophysical properties, and combining them with biology to develop tools that address unmet needs in basic and translational research. Since the Aran Lab’s Nature publication on merging CRISPR with electronic devices in early 2019, scientists and engineers have developed a smorgasbord of new technologies based on its work, combining CRISPR with electrochemical sensors, impedimetric sensors, and other types of electronic sensors powered by CRISPR technology. Taking CRISPR-Chip technology to the commercialization stage, with her company’s first service product launch in August of 2020, has enabled researchers across many other fields to benefit from the technology and to utilize it for applications beyond genotyping. For example, understanding the interaction of various RNAs with proteins or confirming the efficiency of CRISPR editing. As this technology toolbox expands, Dr. Aran foresees opportunities for other fields flourishing into ever-expanding disciplines such as increased portable medical diagnostics, further integration into genotyping and sequencing, and improvement upon conventional, burdensome lab techniques for more affordable and accessible scientific discoveries. In this talk, Dr. Aran will explore the utility of biology as a technology element in her engineered tools, to expand the toolbox of technology, opening up new avenues of research in cancer, aging, pandemics, and improving CRISPR-based editing outcomes.
Dr. Kiana Aran is the Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer at Cardea Bio, an Associate Professor of Medical Diagnostics and Therapeutics at Keck Graduate Institute, a member of the Claremont Colleges, and a visiting Assistant Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Aran also serves as a Consultant of Drug Delivery and Medical Diagnostics for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. She received her undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from the City University of New York in 2007 and her Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from Rutgers University in 2012. She then continued her postdoctoral studies in bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and was a recipient of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) postdoctoral training fellowship at the Buck Institute for Aging Research in 2015. Her research efforts focus on designing novel biosensing platforms, using 2D nanomaterials, for early disease diagnosis as well as utilizing biology as tech elements for a variety of biosensing applications. In addition to biosensing, she combines various engineering modules to develop tools to better understand the process of aging. Dr. Aran’s scientific vision is to explore the utility of nano-electronic systems to develop transformative and customizable platforms for multiomics applications and the commercialization of these platform. Her efforts have been recognized within the scientific community by the Clinical OMICs 10 under 40 Award, Athena Pinnacle Award in Life Sciences, and Nature Research Awards for Inspiring Women in Science: Scientific Achievement Category’s Overall Winner. Dr. Aran is also the recipient of numerous government grants to develop the next generation of electronic biosensors.