James Dahlman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory School of Medicine. His lab works at the interface of drug delivery, genomics, and gene editing by applying big data and ‘technology development’ approaches to nanomedicine. James’ students have developed DNA barcoded nanoparticles to measure how hundreds of nanoparticles deliver mRNA and siRNA in multiple cell types in vivo, all from a single animal. Since 2016, the lab has used DNA barcoding to quantify thousands of nanoparticles in vivo, thereby identifying nanoparticles that deliver RNA to new cell types without targeting ligands. His lab uses these approaches to (i) improve cell type-specific gene therapy targeting and (ii) identify genes acting as master regulators of nanoparticle delivery in vivo. James was a co-founder and Board Member of Guide Therapeutics, a DNA barcoding biotech, which was acquired by Beam Therapeutics.
James has published in Science, Cell, Nature, Nature Nanotech, Nature Biotech, Nature BME, Science Translational Medicine, Advanced Materials, JACS, PNAS, Scientific American, and other high-impact journals. Since starting his lab in 2016, James has won the Rita Schaffer Award, ASGCT Outstanding New Investigator Award, GT Outstanding Achievement in Early Career Research Award, Tech Review TR35, Controlled Release Society GDGE Award, had his barcoding work described as a Top 10 Emerging Technology by the World Economic Forum, and won young investigator awards from CMBE, Bayer, Parkinson’s Foundation, Journal of Materials Chemistry B, and others. James graduated with a B.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Wright State in 2009. He received his Ph.D. in 2015 from the Harvard-MIT HST Program, where he studied non-liver RNA delivery with Robert Langer. As a post-doc, he studied CRISPR-Cas9 with Feng Zhang.