Steven McCarroll’s scientific goal is to understand how genes and alleles affect neuronal biology in the human brain, and to develop new, data-rich experimental strategies to reveal how brain biology becomes altered in illness. McCarroll trained in molecular neuroscience as a graduate student in Cori Bargmann’s lab, then in human genetics and genomics as a postdoc with David Altshuler and Mark Daly. His lab develops and applies new molecular and computational methods for better understanding single-cell biology, genome variation, and the relationship of genes and alleles to biological variation and disease mechanisms. For example, McCarroll’s team developed droplet-based single-cell RNA-seq Drop-seq to better understand how genes and alleles shape the biology of each cell population within complex tissues. They apply these approaches to better understand the cellular and molecular organization of the nervous system and the ways in which genes and alleles shape pathophysiological processes.
McCarroll is excited about the proposed work, which offers an opportunity to collaborate with many outstanding scientists to understand the extent to which aging-associated molecular changes are shared across species;, across individuals of the same species;, across cell types;, and between males and females. The collaboration across species and approaches will create exciting interactions and an opportunity to address an important unmet medical need.
Project:
Conserved regulatory pathways in age-related loss of plasticity and cognitive function