Samira Kiani
Health systems engineer
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Samira Kiani (Persian: سمیرا کیانی) is an Associate Professor in the department of Pathology of University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and Pittsburgh Liver Research Center. Formerly, she was a Health Systems Engineer at Arizona State University. Her work combines Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeat (CRISPR) with synthetic biology. She is a 2019 AAAS Leshner Fellow.
Samira Kiani | |
|---|---|
| Alma mater | Tehran University of Medical Sciences |
| Known for | CRISPR |
| Scientific career | |
| Institutions | Massachusetts Institute of Technology Arizona State University |
Early life and education
Kiani is from Iran.[1] She earned her medical degree at the Tehran University of Medical Sciences.[2] She completed a thesis on the molecular mechanisms of tissue injury.[2] She joined the Freeman Hospital in Newcastle upon Tyne, where she was trained in general medicine.[2] She joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working as a postdoctoral researcher in synthetic biology at MIT Synthetic Biology Center.[2] She has acted as an advisor for the MIT International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) team.[2] She collaborated with George Church and Ron Weiss to advance CRISPR technology.[3][4] They developed a CRISPR based a modular transcriptional repression architecture that can be used to create functional cascaded circuits.[4]
Research and career
Kiani joined Arizona State University in 2016 and later moved to University of Pittsburgh in January 2020.[1][5][6] She was awarded a DARPA fellowship to investigate hearing loss caused by traumatic injuries.[7] The loud noises of combat zones can result in a health threat to military personnel.[7] Kiani works on safer gene therapies, including Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeat (CRISPR). The Cas9 protein works to cleave DNA, and can be targeted using a gRNA.[8] When the gRNA reaches the target site it performs a double strand break, enabling gene disruption or editing.[8] The Kiani lab looks to control where and when this gene disruption occurs. She has investigated whether CRISPR could be used to restore hearing loss after acoustic trauma and aminoglycoside.[8] She working on the optimisation of CRISPR gene editing using RNA pol II.[8] She has discussed her work on the Future Tech podcast.[9]
Her research is also supported by two grants from National Institute of Health, the most recent one being $2,600,000 from the National Institutes of Health.[10][11] The proposal looks to develop a human liver-on-a-chip using CRISPR.[12][13]
Public engagement
In 2019 Kiani was announced as a Leshner Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.[14] She is working with Cody Sheehy to create a documentary entitled The Human Game. Kiani serves as the co-producer on the project, which looks to create a deeper discussion between the public and scientists about CRISPR technologies. In addition, together with Cody Sheehy, they are promoting a public engagement initiative called Tomorrow.Life aimed at increasing participation of broader stakeholders in decisions about future of science through collaborative visual story telling.[15]