Christina
Theodoris

Christina Theodoris, MD, PhD is an Assistant Investigator at Gladstone Institutes and University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). The Theodoris lab develops AI models that leverage large-scale biological data to gain a fundamental understanding of gene network dynamics and accelerate discovery of network-correcting therapies for human disease. Dr. Theodoris completed her undergraduate at California Institute of Technology, where her research in the Eric Davidson Lab focused on gene regulatory networks in early development. In her MD/PhD research at UCSF, she developed an innovative network-based approach to therapeutic design leveraging machine learning and iPS cell disease modeling, which ultimately identified a candidate therapy for cardiac valve disease, currently under further development toward clinical trial. As a postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, she developed a foundational AI model, Geneformer, pretrained most recently on >100 million human single-cell transcriptomes to enable context-specific predictions in gene network biology through transfer learning. Dr. Theodoris has been recognized with honors including the NIH Director’s Early Independence Award, Searle Scholars Award, and Burroughs Wellcome Career Awards for Medical Scientists.