Tassa Saldi, PhD

Tassa Saldi, PhD has a long and impressive career in molecular biology and genomics. In 2020, they became the Chief Science Officer and Cofounder of TUMI Genomics and the COVID Surveillance Laboratory Director at the University of Colorado Boulder. At the University of Colorado Boulder, they developed and deployed a saliva-based, surveillance assay to screen asymptomatic students and staff for COVID-19 infection. Tassa also conducted research exploring the connection between SARS-CoV-2 variants and viral load and characterizing the respiratory microbiome in saliva samples from infected individuals compared to uninfected. From 2014 to 2020, they were a Research Instructor and Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, where they studied how transcription elongation rate impacts pre-mRNA processing and cotranscriptional RNA structure. From 2006 to 2014, they were a Professional Research Assistant and PhD student at the University of Colorado Boulder, where they studied pathogenic mechanisms leading to the neurological disorder ALS. During their research, they discovered that the ALS-associated protein, TDP-43, plays a broad role in controlling nascent RNA secondary structure and in the localization of heterochromatin protein 1 (HP1).

Tassa Saldi, PhD, earned a Doctor of Biology - PhD degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2013. Prior to that, they earned a Bachelor's degree in Molecular Biology from the same university in 2001.