Samira Kiani

Samira Kiani is an associate professor in the department of Pathology of University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and Pittsburgh Liver Research Center. Formerly, she was a Health Systems Engineer at Arizona State University. Her work combines Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeat (CRISPR) with synthetic biology. She is a 2019 AAAS Leshner Fellow.

Early life and education Kiani is from Iran. She earned her medical degree at the Tehran University of Medical Sciences. She completed a thesis on the molecular mechanisms of tissue injury. They developed a CRISPR based a modular transcriptional repression architecture that can be used to create functional cascaded circuits. She was awarded a DARPA fellowship to investigate hearing loss caused by traumatic injuries. The loud noises of combat zones can result in a health threat to military personnel. When the gRNA reaches the target site it performs a double strand break, enabling gene disruption or editing.

Her research is also supported by two grants from National Institute of Health, the most recent one being $2,600,000 from the National Institutes of Health. The proposal looks to develop a human liver-on-a-chip using CRISPR.

Public engagement In 2019 Kiani was announced as a Leshner Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is working with Cody Sheehy to create a documentary entitled The Human Game. Kiani serves as the co-producer on the project, which looks to create a deeper discussion between the public and scientists about CRISPR technologies. In addition, together with Cody Sheehy, they are promoting a public engagement initiative called Tomorrow.Life aimed at increasing participation of broader stakeholders in decisions about future of science through collaborative visual story telling.