{"id":14776,"date":"2025-02-21T09:27:35","date_gmt":"2025-02-21T14:27:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.med.unc.edu\/genetics\/?p=14776"},"modified":"2025-02-21T09:28:27","modified_gmt":"2025-02-21T14:28:27","slug":"highlighted-faculty-christoph-rau-phd-assistant-professor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.med.unc.edu\/genetics\/highlighted-faculty-christoph-rau-phd-assistant-professor\/","title":{"rendered":"Highlighted Faculty: Christoph Rau, PhD, Assistant Professor"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Christoph
Dr. Christoph Rau, Assistant Professor of Genetics<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Department of Genetics is proud to highlight Dr. Christoph Rau for his excellence in research, mentorship, and service.<\/p>\n

Dr. Rau has been an assistant professor in the Department of Genetics since 2020.\u00a0 He is also a member of the Computational Medicine Program and the McAllister Heart Institute.\u00a0 Dr. Rau earned his Bachelor\u2019s degree in Mathematical Biology from Harvey Mudd College and his Ph.D. in Microbiology, Immunology, and Molecular Genetics from the University of California\u2014Los Angeles (UCLA).\u00a0 He also completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Cardiology at UCLA.<\/p>\n

Dr. Rau\u2019s research program focuses on understanding how genetic variation drives differences in heart failure\u00a0susceptibility and progression. His lab takes a systems genetics approach, integrating genomic, epigenetic, and transcriptomic data to map key regulatory genes that influence cardiac disease. \u00a0Much of Dr. Rau\u2019s 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

In addition to his research work, Dr. Rau is deeply committed to education and mentorship.\u00a0 For the last 3 years, he has served as a First Year Group leader for UNC\u2019s Biological & Biomedical Sciences Program (BBSP), where he supports new graduate students in the process of identifying rotation opportunities and long term lab placements.\u00a0 He also serves on the BBSP admissions committee and teaches a course on the use of animal models to study human diseases.\u00a0 Over the years, he has mentored many student researchers and postdoctoral fellows who have gone on to successful careers in academia, industry, and medicine.\u00a0 He strives to create a lab environment that emphasizes scientific curiosity, professional development, and work-life balance.<\/p>\n

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!).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Department of Genetics is proud to highlight Dr. Christoph Rau for his excellence in research, mentorship, and service.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28418,"featured_media":9083,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[209],"class_list":["post-14776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-rau","odd"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nHighlighted Faculty: Christoph Rau, PhD, Assistant Professor | Department of Genetics<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.med.unc.edu\/genetics\/highlighted-faculty-christoph-rau-phd-assistant-professor\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" 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