Shakiba Lab (stem cell fitness engineering)

The Shakiba Lab aims to uncover the genetic rules that govern competition between stem cells with the long-term goal of improving the commercialization and clinical efficacy of cell therapies.

As a biomedical engineer, Dr. Shakiba has expertise at the intersection of stem cell research and synthetic biology, allowing her to utilize cell competition as a novel parameter to reverse and forward engineer stem cell systems for regenerative medicine applications. To date, her work has developed a framework to quantitatively track the dynamics (growth, survival and elimination) of competing stem cell populations, applying multi-scale computational modeling techniques to uncover the emergence of elite competitors. Dr. Shakiba’s research program combines measurements of multicellular population dynamics with single cell resolution, the use of synthetic genetic circuits to perturb and control the expression of key fitness genes, and small-scale bioprocess tools to inform cell therapy manufacturing.