Karl
Wahlin

Dr. Karl J. Wahlin is the Director of the Richard C. Atkinson Laboratory for Regenerative Ophthalmology and an Associate Professor in the Department of Ophthalmology at the University of California, San Diego. He received his PhD in 2009 from the Department of Neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where he identified the importance of Müller glia in mediating protective responses to survival-promoting neurotrophic factors. During his dissertation, he studied synaptogenesis, the process that allows neurons to communicate with one another. As a postdoc at the Wilmer Eye Institute, he used stem cells to create three-dimensional models of the human eye. Since establishing his lab in 2016, his research interests have focused on understanding how the human retina forms, why cells die during disease, and ultimately, how to restore vision after the retina has failed. His laboratory develops CRISPR-based gene-editing technology to create fluorescent reporters and to explore gene function. Another focus of his research has been to understand how genes control cell diversity in the retina. For this, he developed gene switches to selectively activate TF gene expression, which helps identify the critical genes involved in cell fate. These technologies are being applied to an exciting area in regenerative medicine known as endogenous regeneration, a process in which existing support cells are repurposed to create new retinal cells that replace those lost due to disease.