Kasandra Diaz Santana is a postdoctoral fellow at The Jackson Laboratory in New York, where she works on the Array Discovery Platform team to develop induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)–derived neural models for studying Parkinson’s disease (PD) and other neurodegenerative conditions. Her work supports JAX’s mission by generating scalable, human‑relevant systems that advance therapeutic discovery and deepen understanding of disease mechanisms.
Her research centers on the NYSCF Global Stem Cell Array®, a high‑throughput automation platform used to differentiate and phenotype iPSC‑derived neurons, astrocytes and microglia. She has contributed to projects modeling PD, Alzheimer’s disease, post‑traumatic stress disorder and schizophrenia. Diaz Santana has played a key role in developing automated, multi‑lineage differentiation protocols and pipelines for environmental toxin screens that evaluate factors capable of exacerbating PD‑linked phenotypes in human neurons.
A pivotal personal experience—her brother’s stroke at age 18—inspired her pursuit of neuroscience and her commitment to translational neurodegenerative disease research.
Diaz Santana earned her Ph.D. in neuroscience from Iowa State University, where she studied inflammatory cytokine profiles in PD patients using flow cytometry, ELISA and MILLIPLEX assays. She joined NYSCF in 2023, working with iPSC‑derived neural models carrying PD‑linked mutations, and became part of JAX through the NYSCF acquisition. She hopes her work will accelerate drug discovery by clarifying cell‑type–specific mechanisms underlying PD onset and progression.