Tyler Hansen

PhD Candidate | Vanderbilt University

Current

I’m a Postdoc in Dr. Luis Barreiro’s Lab at the University of Chicago. I’m broadly interested in functional genomics and human evolution.

Previous

I obtained my Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Vanderbilt University in 2023. I worked in the Dr. Emily Hodges Lab to develop and apply functional genomic technologies to understand gene regulatory evolution of humans. During the first several years of my PhD, I developed the ATAC-STARR-seq method, which provides genome-wide measures of regulatory activity, chromatin accessibility, and TF binding at human gene regulatory elements. After developing ATAC-STARR-seq, I spent the second half of my PhD applying it to investigate cis and trans effects on human gene regulatory evolution in collaboration with Dr. Tony Capra’s Lab at UCSF.

In 2015, I graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a B.S. in Biochemistry. While there, I worked as an undergraduate researcher for 3.5 years in Dr. Judith Kimble’s lab where I studied the molecular processes that dictate stem cell self-renewal and differentiation decisions in the C. elegans germline.

After undergrad, I worked for two years as postbac in Dr. Andy Golden’s lab at the National Institutes of Health. There, I used CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing to generate molecular models of rare human monogenic diseases in C. elegans for purposes of elucidating unknown disease mechanisms and developing potential drug treatments.

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