Brian Iskra, Ph.D.

Brian Iskra completed his Ph.D. in the lab of Greg Aune, MD, PhD in the spring of 2020. As a student in the South Texas Medical Scientist Training Program (MD/PhD Program), Brian has transitioned back to medical school for his final two years of clinical training before an anticipated MD graduation of May 2023.

His graduate project focused on developing novel approaches to understand how anthracycline agents induce cardiac disease in childhood cancer survivors. In particular, he developed protocols for obtaining single cell suspensions for single cell analysis, preparing cells for single cell RNA sequencing, and performing mass cytometry on cardiac non-myocytes. Additionally, he developed a joint analysis methods to identify cell populations in mass cytometry and single cell RNA sequencing datasets, expediting data analysis as well as enabling high confidence assessment of cell identity in mass cytometry data. His expertise in single cell analysis methods covers data preprocessing/primary analysis, traditional approaches to single cell analysis, and deep learning as well as unsupervised and supervised learning. In addition to working on cardiac disease, Brian has collaborated on projects involving Ewing-Sarcoma, where he has employed his understanding of single cell data analysis and biology.