James Dahlman, PhD, is joining Emory as Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering effective September 1, 2022. He is currently the McCamish Early Career Professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering.
Dahlman started his lab at Georgia Tech in 2016. By transitioning his work to Emory, Dahlman will be able to cultivate even stronger connections to our clinical enterprise and core resources, elevating his work across both institutions and accelerating discovery that will benefit patients and communities around the world.
"It is a great time to be translational scientist in Atlanta," said Dahlman. "I am an engineer who delivers mRNA drugs to the right cells in order to treat disease. Given the potential clinical impact of next-generation mRNA drugs, I am extremely excited to join Emory School of Medicine. I look forward to working with, and learning from, my medical colleagues, who helped mRNA vaccines reach the clinic. I also look forward to contributing to the rapidly growing Atlanta biotech ecosystem."
Dahlman's lab works at the interface of chemical engineering, genomics, and gene editing by applying big data approaches to nanomedicine. His team is known for developing DNA barcoded nanoparticles to measure how hundreds of nanoparticles deliver mRNA and siRNA in multiple cell types from a single animal in vivo. The lab uses these approaches to deliver RNA outside the liver.
Dahlman was a co-founder and Board Chairman of Guide Therapeutics, which was acquired by Beam Therapeutics. His trainees have become venture capitalists, gone into academia, and work in some of the most cutting-edge organizations in RNA therapeutics. He has also been recognized for teaching excellence more than ten times since he started teaching in 2017.
Dahlman's work directly aligns with the goals of the School of Medicine's Excellence to Eminence strategic plan, which focuses on innovation and finding solutions to the major problems impacting human health.
James has published in Nature, Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Biomedical Engineering, Nature Metabolism, Science, Science Translational Medicine, Cell, and other high-impact journals. He has won awards including the BMES Rita Schaffer Award, ASGCT Outstanding New Investigator Award, Tech Review TR35, and had his barcoding work described as a Top 10 Emerging Technology by the World Economic Forum. James received his Ph.D. in 2015 from the Harvard-MIT HST Program, where he studied with Robert Langer, and as a post-doc, studied CRISPR-Cas9 with Feng Zhang.
"Dahlman's work directly aligns with the goals of the School of Medicine's Excellence to Eminence strategic plan, which focuses on innovation and finding solutions to the major problems impacting human health," said Vikas P. Sukhatme, Dean of Emory School of Medicine. "We look forward to welcoming this outstanding scientist and mentor to Emory."