Christoph Rau, PhD and Alex Rubinsteyn, PhD joined the Department of Genetics/Computational Medicine Program as Assistant Professors on the tenure track, effective March 1, 2020.
Christoph’s research focuses on using model organism populations to study cardiovascular disease. He obtained a PhD in Microbiology, Immunology and Molecular Genetics at UCLA, where he began working with the Hybrid Mouse Diversity Panel to study the genetics underlying heart failure. During his postdoc, he expanded into studying the epigenome and developing new co-expression network algorithms to study the concerted effects of multiple genes on phenotypes relating to cardiovascular disorders. Christoph is a member of the Computational Medicine Program and his lab and office are on 11th floor of MEJ Building.
Alex’s received his PhD in Computer Science from NYU and then joined the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai as a Research Scientist, where he worked on personalized cancer vaccine trials, becoming head of the OpenVax Research Group. Since joining UNC, he has been applying the rapid design principles of personalized cancer vaccines to make a peptide vaccine against SARS-CoV-2. He is collaborating with Ben Vincent’s lab, which is also working on vaccine antigen selection for SARS-CoV-2 and will be doing some preclinical experiments to help validate vaccine candidates. Alex is also a member of the Computational Medicine Program and his lab and office are on 11th floor of MEJ Building.
Welcome Christoph and Alex!