Faculty Profiles

Bioengineering professor Kiana Aran develops bioelectronics for multi-omics studies, targeted drug delivery, and studying the mechanisms of aging. She pioneers approaches to fuse CRISPR and electronics to improve the quality of genotyping and gene editing. She is a founder of two San Diego biotechnology companies and holds a joint appointment with UC San Diego School of Medicine.  

Capsule Bio:

Professor Aran previously served as an Associate Professor of Medical Diagnostics and Therapeutics at Keck Graduate Institute, a member of the Claremont Colleges, a visiting Assistant Professor at the University of California Berkeley, and the Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer at Cardea Bio, a biotechnology company developing graphene-based biosensors, with successful acquisition. She is also the cofounder of CRISPR QC, a biotechnology company that develops analytical tools for CRISPR.

Prof. Aran received her PhD in Biomedical Engineering at Rutgers University in 2012. She then continued her postdoctoral studies in bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley and was a recipient of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) postdoctoral training fellowship at the Buck Institute for Aging Research in 2015. Her efforts have been recognized within the scientific community by the Clinical OMICs 10 under 40 Award, Athena Pinnacle Award in Life Sciences, NSF Career award, Nature Research Awards for Inspiring Women in Science: Scientific Achievement Category’s Overall Winner in 2021 and Distinguished Engineering Medal of Excellence from Rutgers University in 2022 and Inc. USA top 200 female founders in 2023. Dr. Aran is also a selected member of World minds community and is the recipient of multiple National Science Foundation, National Institute of Health, Department of Defense, NASA and Gates foundation grants as well as awards from the private sector to develop the next generation of electronics for precision medicine.