James Dahlman is a chemical / bioengineer who works at the interface of nanotechnology, genomics, and gene editing. He is studying gene editing with Feng Zhang at the Broad Institute. He received his PhD from MIT and Harvard Medical School in 2014, where he studied RNA delivery and gene therapies with Robert Langer and Daniel Anderson. He will start his own lab in the Georgia Tech / Emory Department of Biomedical Engineering in 2016.
James designs nanotechnology to deliver genetic drugs to the right cells in the body. He uses molecular biology to rationally design and improve these drugs. He designed nanoparticles that deliver RNAs to blood vessels; these nanoparticles can deliver many genetic therapies to the same cell at once, and have been used by labs across the US. He also recently discovered ‘dead’ guide RNAs; these can be used to simultaneously up- and down-regulate different genes in a single cell using a single Cas9 protein.
James has won the NSF, NDSEG, Whitaker International, NIH OxCam, Whitaker Graduate, and LSRF Fellowships, as well as the Weintraub Graduate Thesis Award. Importantly, James has had help along the way. Besides having great scientific advisors, James has been lucky enough to mentor excellent students, including two that were finalists for the Rhodes Scholarship.