Rate My Professor Avi Samelson

Avi Samelson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Neurology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Biological Chemistry. He joined UCLA in January 2025 after completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases at the University of California, San Francisco. Samelson earned a Bachelor of Arts in Biological Sciences from Northwestern University in 2010 and a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2017.

His research examines how different brain cell types regulate and respond to protein aggregation, a key feature of neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and ALS. He investigates aggregation trajectories, the ubiquitin-proteasome system’s role in degrading proteins such as tau and alpha-synuclein, post-translational modifications, and early molecular events in disease progression. Samelson utilizes protein energy landscape approaches, CRISPR-based systems genetics, and induced pluripotent stem cell-derived neurons and glia to map relevant cellular pathways. He has received the NIH Pathway to Independence Award (K99/R00) and served as a Tau Leadership Fellow with the Rainwater Foundation. Samelson has contributed to numerous peer-reviewed publications on tau proteostasis, CRISPR screens in iPSC-derived models, protein folding on the ribosome, and related topics in biophysics and cell biology. He maintains affiliations with the UCLA Molecular Biology Institute, Brain Research Institute, and Broad Stem Cell Research Center.