Directors

Rajat Singh, MD, MBBS
Director, Comprehensive Liver Research Center
Professor of Medicine
Vatche and Tamar Manoukian Division of Digestive Diseases
David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA 

Dr. Singh earned his MBBS degree at the Medical College of the University of Calcutta in 2000, and his MD at PGIMER, Chandigarh, India in 2004. He joined the lab of Dr. Mark Czaja at the Marion Bessin Liver Research Center of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine to pursue postdoctoral training in basic liver research. In the course of his postdoctoral research (in collaboration with Dr. Ana Maria Cuervo), Dr. Singh discovered the process of lipophagy, a previously unknown way cells degrade fat stores. After successful postdoctoral training with first-author papers in high-impact journals such as Nature, Journal of Clinical Investigation, Hepatology, and the Journal of Biological Chemistry, and supported by a K award, Dr. Singh started his own lab at Albert Einstein in 2010. Since then, his lab has demonstrated novel roles of autophagy in the regulation of food intake (Cell Metabolism 2011 and EMBO reports 2012), energy metabolism (Cell Metabolism 2016), cell signaling (Nature Communications 2013), and the circadian clock (Cell Metabolism 2018). The Singh Lab has also developed a novel feeding intervention that protects against fatty liver and type II diabetes in various mouse models of obesity and aging without the need to cut caloric intake (Cell Metabolism 2017). The Singh Lab intends to initiate a human study at UCLA testing the impact of two meals a day on liver and systemic metabolism. The Singh Lab is funded by three R01 grants, a P01, and an R56, as well as training grants to his students, including an F31 fellowship. Current projects in the Singh Lab investigate novel integrative mechanisms regulating liver and systemic metabolism in models of aging and obesity. Dr. Singh is a standing member of the CMAD study section at the NIH. His research interests include autophagy, liver lipid metabolism, mTOR signaling and aging.

Vatche G. Agopian, MD
Professor of Surgery and Pharmacology
Director, Dumont-UCLA Liver Cancer Center
Co-Director, Comprehensive Liver Research Center
Liver Transplantation and Hepatobiliary Surgery
Department of Surgery
David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA 

Dr. Agopian is professor of surgery and pharmacology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, and serves as the director of the Dumont-UCLA Liver Cancer Center, which includes a multidisciplinary team of hepatologists, medical oncologists, interventional radiologists, radiation oncologists, and interventional gastroenterologists in delivering evidence-based, state-of-the-art care to patients with primary and secondary liver malignancies. His clinical expertise is focused on liver transplantation and the surgical management of both benign and malignant conditions of the liver and bile ducts. Dr. Agopian is the principal investigator of a National Institutes of Health funded translational laboratory focused on the development of blood-based biomarkers (“liquid biopsy”) for the early detection and prognostication of hepatocellular carcinoma- the most common primary liver malignancy. In this capacity, he has developed an extensive biorepository of blood and tissue samples from patients with liver cancer, cirrhosis, and healthy controls. He also serves as the deputy editor of Liver Transplantation, a leading journal in the field.