Siavish Kurdistani is Chair and Professor in the Department of Biological Chemistry at UCLA and holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. Additionally, he is the Associate Director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research.
Kurdistani received his B.S. degree in Biochemistry from UCLA in 1994 and his M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1999. As an undergraduate student researcher, he worked in the field of Host-Guest Chemistry under the mentorship of Donald J. Cram, a 1987 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry. In medical school, Kurdistani was awarded a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Medical Student Fellowship to conduct research in the laboratory of Sam W. Lee. After completing an internship in Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at UCLA, Kurdistani received an HHMI Postdoctoral Fellowship for advanced training in chromatin biology in the laboratory of Michael Grunstein at the UCLA Molecular Biology Institute. His postdoctoral work earned him the UCLA Chancellor’s Award for Postdoctoral Fellows. He joined the faculty at UCLA in 2004 and became department chair in 2014. He was elected to the American Society for Clinical Investigation in 2019. His laboratory investigates the functions of histones in eukaryotic evolution and human disease.
