Dr. Ana Cristancho, Assistant Professor of Neurology and Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania and Attending Neurologist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in the Division of Child Neurology, is a child neurologist-scientist who is motivated and passionate about studying the molecular mechanisms of developmental brain injury. Dr. Cristancho grew up in the Miami suburbs, where she went to Western High School near Fort Lauderdale. She stayed in the greater Miami area to attend University of Miami and developed a passion for Hurricanes football and her interest in science. She was motivated to pursue a career in science and medicine based on family medical issues. At the University of Miami, she was in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Undergraduate Research Training Program and was selected for the HHMI Exceptional Research Opportunities Program. Dr. Cristancho was a dual major in philosophy and biology and wrote a magna cum laude thesis merged on the applicability of the scientific method to actual scientific practice.
Dr. Cristancho then moved to Philadelphia to matriculate into the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine MD/PhD program. At Penn, she earned her PhD in the laboratory of Dr. Mitch Lazar, where she studied adipogenesis. Her work focused on transcriptional regulation of fat generation using profiling methods. She published two high-profile manuscripts in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and an article in Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology describing the mechanisms of fat cell differentiation that has been cited over 700 times. After her PhD, she knew that she wanted to continue working on transcriptional regulation, but she wanted to pivot to neurology and neuroscience. Dr. Cristancho had a long-simmering interest in neurology and neuroscience but had avoided doing research in this area. When she returned to the clinical years after her PhD, she fell in love with the challenge of how to tailor the impact of an injury and its treatment based on the stage of development of the child. As children are constantly evolving, therapies and mechanisms have to change as well. This broad idea has motivated her science and translational research. Equally important in her decision to pursue child neurology was her intrinsic enjoyment of watching kids’ personalities and skills develop from infants to children to young adults.
Dr. Cristancho was highly recruited to stay at CHOP’s Child Neurology Program, and she has a clear drive to return to the lab and combine her clinical work with basic science insight into diseases. With this drive to work in lab, she applied for and was awarded the NINDS R25 award to dedicate time in lab. Once back in lab, she had to pivot to work in developmental neuroscience and translational studies. She was motivated to study hypoxia by the patients she was caring for as a trainee. This transition required her to learn a plethora of new techniques, and she endeavored to establish a new clinically-relevant mouse model of prenatal hypoxia. Even though she had only basic experience in neuroscience, she focused her efforts on developing and probing preclinical models in a clinically relevant manner. Dr. Cristancho quickly established multiple collaborations throughout the institution and settled on working with Dr. Eric Marsh, child neurologist and neuroscientist and Professor of Neurology and Pediatrics, and Dr Stewart Anderson, developmental biologist and Professor of Psychiatry. She was quickly productive, contributing to multiple manuscripts during her post-doctoral work on clinically-relevant neurodevelopmental models, including three first or co-first author publications. She was awarded the CHOP Alavi-Dabiri Award for excellence in post-doctoral studies in recognition of her success.
When it came time to establish her own lab, Dr. Cristancho continued her focus on understanding mechanisms with potential therapeutic engagement by combining her molecular biology/transcriptional regulation background with the neuroscience training she gained during her R25 time in the Marsh and Anderson labs to further study the neuroepigenetics of prenatal hypoxia. The Cristancho lab focuses on integrating a model of mild Hypoxia-Ischemia with multi-omic single cell data to generate insightful hypotheses about how mild reduction in oxygen and blood flow alters neurodevelopment in a long-lasting but anatomically unidentifiable manor. With this work, she has become a member of Center for Mitochondrial and Epigenetic Medicine, allowing her to be at the cutting edge of interrogating the complex interaction of a cell’s metabolic state and the epigenetic modifications driving gene expression. One of the interesting implications of her work using single cell multiomics across the lifespan after transient hypoxia is to potentially find ways to improve outcomes for the brain after the early injury period, expanding the therapeutic window from hours to days to instead months to years after the insult.
Recently, Dr. Cristancho has received a number of awards that expand her interests from transient hypoxia apply to other models. She has successfully obtained R21 funding in collaboration with Dr. Yijen Wu at the University of Pittsburgh Medical School to combine single cell multiomics with in vivo metabolic imaging to understand the effects of the variable metabolic response on epigenetic profiles. Further, she will receive a DP1 award to expand the multi-omics developmental insult approach to prenatal opioid exposure in collaboration with Dr. Julie Blendy at Penn. While many people try to simplify the models they study, Dr. Cristancho uniquely wants to methodically improve our understanding of complex models that are more likely to be relevant to affected patients. In an era where we recognize the limitations of traditional approaches that minimize variability to result in meaningful translational potential, she hopes that by exploiting the variability she can increase the chance of having meaningful impact. Rounding out a holistic approach to our understanding of prenatal insults, she is interested in understanding the molecular consequences of social stress on developmental brain injury in preclinical models, recently publishing a provocative piece with colleague Dr. Danielle Barber at the University of Colorado, Denver Children’s Hospital. As social determinants of health are some of the most common modifiers of outcomes, she wants to directly tackle this and other questions that pose a challenge to our standard approach to research in developmental disorders.
In addition to her drive to find mechanisms and treatment for prenatal brain injuries, Dr. Cristancho is dedicated to mentoring undergraduates, graduate students, and early career physician-scientists. Dr. Cristancho is active in the Penn MD/PhD program as a career and thesis mentor. She is also dedicated to ensuring those with all different backgrounds and those from Hispanic cultures are well cared for and represented in physicians and medical care.
Dr. Cristancho is not only a physician-scientist. She is the proud mom to a three-year-old girl who keeps her busy exploring all of the child-friendly museums in the city of Philadelphia and surrounding regions. Dr. Cristancho and her daughter like to try their hand at urban gardening and love watch Miami Hurricanes football. She and her husband, an anesthesiologist, love to explore the find dining scene in Philly as well as the many bike trails that crisscross the region.
Dr. Cristancho will continue her passions of science, medicine, family, and exploration throughout her career. It is very fitting that she is the 2025 Philip R. Dodge Young Investigator Award recipient.