Christopher J.R. Loewen, Ph.D.

Christopher Loewen is a professor in the Department of Cellular and Physiological Sciences at the University of British Columbia. He obtained his Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of British Columbia. His postdoctoral training was in cell biology at University College London under the supervision of Timothy Levine, where he was a Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) postdoctoral fellow.

Loewen’s laboratory develops high-throughput genetic screening technologies in yeast (synthetic genetic analysis, SGA) to study fundamental aspects of cell physiology and human disease. He has been applying these technologies to the study of autism spectrum disorder genes using an approach he pioneered called sentinel interaction mapping (SIM; Young et al., Dis. Model Mech., 2020). SIM exploits human-yeast genetic interactions to create high-throughput in vivo functional assays for human disease genes, which are used to map disease pathways and to assess the effects of disease-linked mutations on gene function.