The Department of Genetics is proud to highlight Dr. Christoph Rau for his excellence in research, mentorship, and service.
Dr. Rau has been an assistant professor in the Department of Genetics since 2020. He is also a member of the Computational Medicine Program and the McAllister Heart Institute. Dr. Rau earned his Bachelor’s degree in Mathematical Biology from Harvey Mudd College and his Ph.D. in Microbiology, Immunology, and Molecular Genetics from the University of California—Los Angeles (UCLA). He also completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Cardiology at UCLA.
Dr. Rau’s research program focuses on understanding how genetic variation drives differences in heart failure susceptibility and progression. His lab takes a systems genetics approach, integrating genomic, epigenetic, and transcriptomic data to map key regulatory genes that influence cardiac disease. Much of Dr. Rau’s work makes use of the Collaborative Cross (CC), a genetically diverse mouse population housed at UNC that that mimics the genetic diversity seen in human populations. His work has been supported by a K99/R00 grant on the role of DNA methylation on heart failure progression and prognosis and by an NIH R01 grant investigating the role of multinucleation in cardiomyocytes.
Currently, Dr. Rau is interested in better understanding how differences between individuals in terms of the numbers of different of types of cells in their heart can affect their susceptibility to heart failure. He and his group have recently shown that accounting for these changes in cell-type composition can lead to uncovering new sets of genes for future study.
In addition to his research work, Dr. Rau is deeply committed to education and mentorship. For the last 3 years, he has served as a First Year Group leader for UNC’s Biological & Biomedical Sciences Program (BBSP), where he supports new graduate students in the process of identifying rotation opportunities and long term lab placements. He also serves on the BBSP admissions committee and teaches a course on the use of animal models to study human diseases. Over the years, he has mentored many student researchers and postdoctoral fellows who have gone on to successful careers in academia, industry, and medicine. He strives to create a lab environment that emphasizes scientific curiosity, professional development, and work-life balance.
Outside of the lab, Dr. Rau enjoys hiking, cooking, choral singing, and playing board games with friends. He is an avid science fiction reader and is always on the lookout for a new book. During the COVID lockdowns, he and his daughter started a tradition of cooking a recipe from a different country every week for nearly two years (their favorite was Nepalese Bara Wo!).