Sanford Stem Cell Fitness and Space Medicine Center

The Sanford Stem Cell Fitness and Space Medicine Center develops platform technologies that measure stem cell fitness in space, with applications for longevity and stem cell fitness on Earth.

Leadership

Director Tatiana Kisseleva, M.D., Ph.D., is a professor of surgery at the UC San Diego School of Medicine, as well as director of the Sanford Stem Cell Fitness and Space Medicine Center at the university’s Sanford Stem Cell Institute. She has served as the director of the Pre-Clinical Models Core of the San Diego Digestive Diseases Research Center, located at the School of Medicine, since November 2022.

Kisseleva’s research focuses on characterizing the gene expression profiles and epigenetic landscapes of mouse and human hepatic myofibroblasts to understand the mechanism behind the development and regression of liver fibrosis. Her primary research interest is the identification of new targets to treat metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (MASH) and metabolic dysfunction-associated and alcohol-related liver disease (MetALD) liver fibrosis and cholestatic fibrosis. She has more than 125 publications in peer-reviewed journals, including Nature and Hepatology.

Deputy Director Ludmil Alexandrov, Ph.D., is a professor at the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine and the Department of Bioengineering at the University of California San Diego, as well as deputy director of the Sanford Stem Cell Fitness and Space Medicine Center at the university’s Sanford Stem Cell Institute. 

Alexandrov’s research focuses on harnessing the vast information contained in large-scale omics datasets to deepen our understanding of the mutagenic and non-mutagenic processes that drive cancer initiation and progression. He aims to leverage this knowledge to identify novel cancer prevention strategies and engineer innovative approaches for targeted treatment. Additionally, he is passionate about developing the next generation of artificial intelligence approaches to address inequalities in pre-cancer interception, cancer diagnosis, and cancer care.

Alexandrov has more than 150 publications in peer-reviewed journals; more than 30 are in Nature, Science, and Cell. He has received multiple awards for his work on mutational signatures in human cancer, including recognition by Forbes in 2014 as one of the 30 “brightest stars” under the age of 30 in Science & Healthcare. Alexandrov is one of six co-investigators leading the Mutographs of Cancer project, an initiative that seeks to fill in the missing gaps to identify the unknown cancer-causing factors and reveal how they lead to cancer by examining cancer patients from 37 countries around the world.