July 12, 2024
New faculty members join Scintillon to study healthy aging and neurological diseases
Scintillon Research Institute welcomes three new faculty members who have joined the institute. Our recent recruitment strategically enhances Scintillon’s existing strengths and primary focus on two areas: healthy aging and neurological diseases.
Dr. Guoping Fan has been appointed as an Adjunct Professor at Scintillon. Dr. Fan, who is also a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Human Genetics at UCLA, obtained his Ph.D. in Neurosciences from Case Western Reserve University in 1995, and conducted postdoctoral research with Dr. Rudolf Jaenisch at MIT. Dr. Fan arrived at UCLA in 2001 as a faculty member and subsequently rose to the rank of Full Professor. His research on stem cells and epigenetics, which will continue both at UCLA and Scintillon, has produced landmark papers concerning the role of DNA methylation in activity-dependent neuronal gene expression, neural cell lineage differentiation, neuronal cell death and degeneration, synaptic plasticity, and learning and memory behaviors. In total, Dr. Fan’s >100 research papers have been cited more than 20,000 times, while he has served as the Principal Investigator or co-Investigator on numerous NIH-, California State-, and foundation-funded grants.
Dr. Alexey Terskikh, a newly appointed Full Professor at Scintillon, received his Ph.D. in molecular immunology from the University of Lausanne (Switzerland), working with Prof. Jean-Pierre Mach. As a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Irv Weissman at Stanford, he discovered common developmental mechanisms between hematopoietic and neural stem cells and also developed the Fluorescent Timer protein. Dr. Terskikh held Assistant and Associate Professor positions at Sanford Burnham Prebys, where his initial research on neural stem cells led to the discovery of the dual role of the SOX2 protein in neural stem and progenitor cells. More recently, he shifted his focus to aging research, where his lab meticulously studied the epigenetic landscapes of cells across their lifespan using artificial intelligence (AI) and discovered age-related progressions of epigenetic marks, enabling the prediction of cell ages from their chromatin structures. His latest research finding is forthcoming in Nature Aging, and has the potential to be used as a tool for the development of therapeutics against age-related diseases.
Dr. Tal Teitz has been appointed as an Associate Professor at Scintillon. Before joining Scintillon, she served as a tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Neuroscience at Creighton University in Omaha, NE. Dr. Teitz earned her Ph.D. from the University of Tel Aviv, Israel. Subsequently, she held positions at UCSF, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, NY, and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, TN. During this time, her research focused on developing pre-clinical animal models and therapeutic treatments for childhood neuroblastoma. Over the past decade at Creighton, Dr. Teitz directed her efforts toward the prevention and treatment of chemotherapy- and noise-induced hearing loss, conditions affecting ten percent of the world's population. Her research team identified promising FDA-approved and clinical-stage drugs that can be repurposed for hearing protection and mitigating cisplatin-induced kidney damage. Her research has resulted in multiple patents and dozens of peer-reviewed publications in high-impact journals including Nature, Nature Medicine, PNAS, JEM, Science Advances, and J Neuroscience.