Speakers

Darren received his B.S. in Music Business (yes, Music Business!!) from Loyola University New Orleans in 2002. After a brief stint in the music industry in Los Angeles, he realized that his true passion was genomics (it's a long story).

So, Darren spent a few years in Donata Vercelli's Lab here at the University of Arizona - his first exposure to asthma genomics research. Darren then got his Ph.D. in Human Genetics from The University of Chicago (in Yoav Gilad's lab). While there, Darren studied how genetic variation in human populations perturbs gene expression and can lead to complex disease susceptibilities. Darren then did his postdoctoral research in Jay Shendure's lab at the University of Washington.

While in Seattle, he developed a novel single-cell chromatin accessibility assay and applied it to several model systems to study the variation in gene regulatory landscapes present in complex tissues.