Ed Lein is a senior investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science and affiliate professor in the neurological surgery and laboratory medicine and pathology departments at the University of Washington.
His areas of expertise include developmental neurobiology, structural and cellular neuroanatomy, transcriptomics and epigenomics, comparative neurobiology and Alzheimer’s disease. His research program work encompasses brain-cell atlasing, comparative neurobiology, Alzheimer’s disease and gene therapy.
Lein joined the Allen Institute in 2004 and has provided scientific leadership for the creation of large-scale anatomical, cellular and gene-expression atlases of the adult and developing mammalian brain as catalytic community resources, including the inaugural Allen Mouse Brain Atlas and a range of developmental and adult human and nonhuman primate brain atlases. His current research interests involve the use of single-cell genomics as a core phenotype to understand brain cellular organization, mammalian conservation and human specificity, define cellular vulnerability in disease and identify regulatory elements that allow cell-type-specific targeting and manipulation.
He leads the Human Cell Types Department, which aims to create comprehensive cell atlases of the human and nonhuman primate brain, understand what is disrupted in Alzheimer’s disease and create tools for precision genetic targeting of brain cell types as transformative tools for basic neuroscience and gene therapy. He is also a member of the BRAIN Initiative Cell Atlas Network and the Organizing Committee of the Human Cell Atlas, and he is a Canadian Institute for Advanced Research fellow.
Lein received a B.S. in biochemistry from Purdue University and a Ph.D. in neurobiology from the University of California, Berkeley and performed postdoctoral work at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.
