Dr. Mandana Arbab is the Lodish Family Assistant Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School, and faculty member of the Rosamund Stone Zander Translational Neuroscience Center at Boston Children’s Hospital. Dr. Arbab received her PhD in Regenerative Medicine at the Hubrecht Institute for Developmental Biology and Stem Cell Research and Utrecht University in The Netherlands where she worked on induced pluripotent stem cell modeling of motor neuron diseases and advancing CRISPR technologies. She went on to complete an NWO Rubicon postdoctoral fellowship at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in the lab of David Liu where she developed the first high-throughput genome-integrated platform to measure the activity of CRISPR tools at synthetic loci in mammalian cells. These data elucidated how target sequence features, DNA repair pathways, and genome editor characteristics affect genome editing outcomes, and enable predictive modeling of Cas9-nuclease and base editor activity to facilitate genome editing strategy design. She has applied these insights to develop in vivo genome editing therapeutics to cure and treat genetic neurological disorders in cells and animal models of human disease. She and her team continue to pursue their goal of developing novel genome editing therapeutics and translating these drugs from bench to bedside. In 2021, Dr. Arbab was awarded a Pathway to Independence Award from the NIH National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.