Karl Wahlin, PhD

Dr. Karl Wahlin received his PhD in neuroscience from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where he studied retinal synaptic development under the guidance of Drs. Ruben Adler and Donald Zack. He then went on to a post-doc position at the Wilmer Eye Institute, where he used human pluripotent stem cells to study human eye development and disease. Currently, he is an assistant professor in the Department of Ophthalmology at the University of California, San Diego, where his main research interests lie with investigating the cell signaling in eye development and disease using 3D retinal organoids and retinal pigment epithelium. His lab is developing novel gene-editing tools to further this research. The goal is to translate these cell-based tools into interventional targets for treating AMD and other retinal dystrophies.