Rate My Professor Daren Cusanovich

Darren A. Cusanovich, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of Arizona College of Medicine – Tucson. He also serves as Assistant Professor at the BIO5 Institute, a member of the Graduate Faculty, and Associate Professor in the Genetics Graduate Interdisciplinary Program.

Cusanovich earned a B.S. in Music Business from Loyola University New Orleans in 2002 and a Ph.D. in Human Genetics from the University of Chicago, studying genetic variation's impact on gene expression and complex disease in Yoav Gilad's laboratory. He completed postdoctoral training in Jay Shendure's lab at the University of Washington, developing single-cell epigenomic assays. In 2018, he joined the University of Arizona through the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine and Asthma and Airway Disease Research Center, advancing from Research Assistant Professor to Associate Professor.

His research examines how the human genome self-regulates to generate cellular diversity and how genetic variation and environmental factors disrupt this, contributing to complex diseases such as asthma. The lab utilizes single-cell genomics technologies to assess tissues comprehensively, innovating at the intersection of functional genomics, computational biology, and cellular biology. Relevant projects include epigenomic studies in cancer models and airway disease responses.

In 2020, Cusanovich received the University of Arizona Health Sciences Career Development Award and a $1.8 million Maximizing Investigators' Research Award (MIRA R35) from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences for early-career research support.

Key publications comprise "A human cell atlas of fetal chromatin accessibility" (Science, 2020), "A Single-Cell Atlas of In Vivo Mammalian Chromatin Accessibility" (Cell, 2018), "Multiplex single-cell profiling of chromatin accessibility by combinatorial cellular indexing" (Science, 2015), "txci-ATAC-seq: a massive-scale single-cell technique to profile chromatin accessibility" (Genome Biology, 2024), and "Single cell 'omic profiles of human aortic endothelial cells and human atherosclerotic lesions" (eLife, 2024). His scholarship has garnered over 8,700 citations, advancing single-cell epigenomics.