Stefan Aigner

Stefan Aigner is an RNA biochemist, neuroscientist and stem cell biologist. Among his many responsibilities in the lab, he is the project coordinator for an NIH-funded U19 academic/industrial collaboration dubbed Copacabana (Collaboration On Preclinical Autism Cellular Assays, Biosignatures And Network Analyses), which is led by the Yeo lab and includes four other labs at UCSD and the Salk Institute, as well as Fluidigm and Allele Biotech as the industrial partners.

Stefan received his PhD in Chemistry and Biochemistry from the University of Colorado at Boulder. In his thesis work in the lab of Nobel laureate Tom Cech, he elucidated the role of p43, a protein subunit of telomerase from the ciliated model organism Euplotes. As a postdoctoral fellow of the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation, Stefan joined the lab of Fred Gage at the Salk Institute to study transcriptional and post-transcriptional gene regulation in embryonic and adult neurogenesis. After brief but highly productive venture into the pharma industry, which led Stefan to Roche in Basel (Switzerland) to establish genome-editing based models of neurodevelopmental disorders, Stefan joined the Yeo lab as an Associate Project Scientist in 2014.