SEBASTIAN PINEDA

ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING & COMPUTER SCIENCE

PI: Myriam Heiman and Manolis Kellis

PhD Student

Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering, Texas A&M University, 2018

Sebastian graduated from Texas A&M University in 2018 with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. His undergraduate research in the lab of Dr. Sung Il Park focused on developing flexible and wireless microscale neural implants for optogenetics and neurosurgical applications. Sebastian joined the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT in August 2018 as a PhD student with the intent of doing research at the interface of electrical engineering and biology. He joined the laboratories of Myriam Heiman at the Broad Institute and Manolis Kellis at CSAIL and currently works on developing experimental and computational tools to study cell type-specific molecular mechanisms underlying neurodegeneration.

PUBLICATIONS:

  • Lee H and Fenster RJ, Pineda SS, Gibbs WS, Mohammadi S, Davila-Velderrain J, et al. Cell Type-Specific Transcriptomics Reveals that Mutant Huntingtin Leads to Mitochondrial RNA Release and Neuronal Innate Immune Activation. Neuron. 2020.
  • Wertz MH, Pineda SS, Lee H, Kulicke R, Kellis M, Heiman M. Interleukin-6 deficiency exacerbates Huntington’s disease model phenotypes. Molecular Neurodegeneration. 2020.
  • Wertz MH, Mitchem MR, Pineda SS, Hachigian LJ, Lee H, Lau V, et al. Genome-wide In Vivo CNS Screening Identifies Genes that Modify CNS Neuronal Survival and mHTT Toxicity. Neuron. 2020.

HONORS & AWARDS:

  • Lemelson Engineering Presidential Fellowship, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Neurobiological Engineering Training Program Fellowship (NIH T32 EB019940-05), MIT CNBE