Ranade Lab

The Ranade lab seeks to understand the cellular and molecular principles of heart development and congenital heart defects.

We are particularly focused on defining the regulatory networks that direct neural crest cell integration into cardiac and neighboring craniofacial structures. Impaired neural crest differentiation underlies developmental abnormalities in syndromic disorders but there are so many open questions about how this happens.

Ultimately, our goal is to identify novel cellular and molecular targets for therapeutic intervention. To that end, we apply the tools of functional genomics – single cell sequencing, pooled CRISPR perturbation screens, novel machine learning algorithms – to both human pluripotent stem cell and mouse models of development and disease.