SynBioBeta Speaker
Kiana Aran
UCSD
Associate Professor
Dr. Kiana Aran is an Associate Professor of Bioengineering and Medicine at the University of California San Diego, where she pioneers the fusion of biology and semiconductor electronics to advance precision medicine, aging and synthetic biology. She is also a founder of multiple tech companies with one successful exit.
Dr. Aran has been recognized globally for her scientific and entrepreneurial impact. She is a member of the National Academy of Inventors and her contributions have earned her numerous prestigious awards. In 2025, she won the inaugural Sony and Nature Award which recognized her as one of the three women tech titans for transformative inventions, San Diego Distinguished Engineer in 2024, USA’s Top 200 Female Founders in 2023, Distinguished Engineer Medal of Excellence from Rutgers in 2022 ( the 2nd woman to win the award since 1960), Nature Research Award for Inspiring Women in Science (2021), NSF CAREER Award, The Scientist’s Top 10 Innovation, 10 under 40 clinical Omics and others. With over 40 issued or pending patents in technology, Aran continues to drive groundbreaking innovations in biotechnology.
SynBioBeta 2026 Tickets are Live
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Kiana
This Year
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Human Health
From Cells to Patients: Solving the Scale Mismatch in Virtual Biology
Drug discovery often measures biology at the cell level while interventions work at the tissue, organ, or whole-patient scale. This mismatch can make accurate cell-level predictions irrelevant in the clinic. This session dives into strategies to bridge that gap: multiscale modeling that nests single-cell dynamics within organ-level simulations, spatial transcriptomics that preserve context, and surrogate models that translate cell-level outputs into clinical biomarkers. Speakers will ask: how do we ensure virtual biology reflects not just what cells do in isolation, but how biology behaves in the real complexity of patients?
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