Hagen Tilgner studied computer science in Germany and France, and after a Master’s thesis (for a French engineering school) at the Sanger Institute (UK), did his PhD with Roderic Guigó at the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona. There he focused on RNA and the co-transcriptionality of splicing. His postdoctoral work at Stanford with Michael Snyder focused on technology development, specifically for long-read transcriptomics.

He started his lab at Weill Cornell in New York City in 2016 focusing on technologies to decipher the actions of RNA isoforms in the brain. The lab is a multi-disciplinary lab, including wet-lab technology development (for example single-cell isoform RNA sequencing, ScISOr-Seq, ScISOr-ATAC) and dry-lab approaches, as well as combined large-scale efforts centered on the brain where Maths/CS, molecular biology and neuroscience backgrounds interact to further our understanding of isoforms in healthy and diseased brain of humans and model organisms.