Rate My Professor Mark Isalan

Professor Mark Isalan is Professor of Engineering Biology in the Department of Life Sciences within the Faculty of Natural Sciences at Imperial College London, where he has served as Deputy Head of the Department since January 2022. He completed his PhD at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, University of Cambridge, from 1996 to 2000, engineering zinc fingers to bind novel DNA sequences under the supervision of Prof. Sir Aaron Klug. Following this, he conducted postdoctoral research from 2000 to 2002 at Gendaq Ltd in the UK, contributing to the CompoZr zinc finger nucleases commercialized by Sigma Aldrich, which served as a forerunner to CRISPR technology. Isalan held a Wellcome Trust International Research Fellowship from 2002 to 2006, working on artificial gene networks in Prof. Luis Serrano's group at EMBL in Heidelberg, Germany. From 2006 to 2013, he was Group Leader at the EMBL-CRG Systems Biology Unit in Barcelona, specializing in synthetic gene network engineering. He joined Imperial College London in 2013, continuing his focus on protein and gene network engineering to design biological systems that operate predictably and robustly.

Isalan's research interests lie in synthetic biology, systems biology, protein engineering, and developing new gene therapy approaches. He has secured major funding, including an ERC Starting Grant. His influential publications include 'Evolvability and hierarchy in rewired bacterial gene networks' (Nature, 2008), 'A rapid, generally applicable method to engineer zinc fingers illustrated by targeting the HIV-1 promoter' (Nature Biotechnology, 2001), 'Synthetic zinc finger repressors reduce mutant huntingtin expression in the brain of R6/2 mice' (PNAS, 2012), 'Gene therapy advances: a meta-analysis of AAV usage in clinical settings' (Frontiers in Medicine, 2022), and 'Engineering orthogonal dual transcription factors for multi-input chemical sensing in complex metabolic pathways' (Nature Communications, 2016). With over 5,950 citations documented on Google Scholar, his work has advanced genome editing technologies, synthetic gene circuits, and therapeutic applications such as Huntington's disease models and bacterial theranostics.