Mustafa Mir, PhD

Assistant Professor

Freeman Hrabowski Scholar, Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Department of Cell and Developmental Biology, University of Pennsylvania

Center for Computational and Genomic Medicine, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia

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Core Member, Penn Epigenetics Institute

Member, Penn Institute for Regenerative Medicine

Recipient, NIH Directors New Innovator Award (2021)

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Dr. Mir received his PhD in Electrical Engineering in  2013 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign working with Gabriel Popescu. During his graduate work he invented new microscopes that provide high resolution quantitative phase images of living cells. He applied these new microscopes to a variety of problems in medicine and the basic life sciences, ranging from clinical pathology of blood samples, to single cell growth, and neural development. 

 

For his postdoctoral work Dr. Mir joined the labs of Xavier Darzacq and Robert Tjian at the University of California, Berkeley where he studied gene regulation in Drosophila embryos using a combination of advanced microscopy methods (especially single molecule imaging), biochemistry, and genomics. Dr. Mir built a customized Lattice-Light Sheet microscope to capture the first data on transcription factor dynamics within the nuclei of a living animal embryo.

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Dr. Mir started his independent lab at UPenn and CHOP in January 2021. His lab focuses on utilizing and developing advanced fluorescence microscopy methods and analysis tools to study gene regulation and nuclear organization during early embryonic development.