Ryan G. Lim
Biography
Ryan G. Lim, Ph.D., is Project Scientist at the University of California, Irvine, Director of Biology at Modulo Bio, Inc., and Chief Scientific Officer at Uncommon Therapeutics, Inc. He received his Ph.D. in Biomedical Sciences from the University of California, Irvine in 2016. His research focuses on neurological disorders, combining expertise in neuroscience, stem cells, computational biology, and precision medicine to advance therapeutic discovery and development.
Lim has been a member of three multi-institutional consortia studying neurodegenerative diseases using induced pluripotent stem cells: the HD iPSC consortium, NeuroLINCS, and AnswerALS. Within the NeuroLINCS-DSGC, he contributed to establishing data and metadata standards for harmonization and sharing across the LINCS consortium. His work with the AnswerALS consortium helped generate one of the largest patient and iPSC-derived datasets, integrating genomic, proteomic, transcriptomic, clinical, and behavioral data from over 1000 ALS and control patients. He established the first iPSC-derived blood-brain barrier model of neurodegeneration and has employed single-cell technologies and systems biology approaches to explore the contributions of neurons, microglia, and other cell types in neurodegenerative disease.
Lim's research has been supported by competitive predoctoral and postdoctoral grants from the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine, the American Heart Association, the National Institutes of Health, and the Hereditary Disease Foundation. His work has revealed connections between metabolic deficits and developmental impairments in Huntington's disease, demonstrating that supplementation with thiamine and biotin can rescue maturation deficits in neuronal and glial cells in mouse models. He has received the Roger W. Russell Scholar's Award in the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory and the Dean's Early Career Research Excellence Award.
Return to topEducation
- B.S. in Micro & Molecular Biology, California State University, Sacramento, 2009
- M.A. in Biological Sciences: Stem Cell concentration, California State University, Sacramento & University of California, Davis, 2011
- Ph.D. in Biomedical Sciences, University of California, Irvine, 2016
Distinctions
- National Research Service Award Predoctoral Fellowship, 2015-2017
- ALS Association - The Lawrence and Isabel Barnett Drug Development Program, 2025-2027
- ADDF - Drug Development RFP, 2024-2026
- Hereditary Disease Foundation Basic Research Grant Award, 2020-2022
- American Heart Association Predoctoral Fellowship, 2012-2014
- California Institute of Regenerative Medicine Predoctoral Fellowship, 2014-2015
- Roger W. Russell Scholar's Award in the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 2017
- Dean's Early Career Research Excellence Award, 2018
- John Wasmuth Graduate Student Research Seminar Award, 2015
- Everest Award, HD Care, 2016
Areas of Expertise
- Neurodegenerative Disease Mechanisms
- Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells
- Transcriptomic Epigenetic Dysregulation
- Blood-Brain Barrier Modeling
- Oligodendrocyte Maturation Deficits
- Single-Nucleus RNA Sequencing
- Multi-Omic Patient Data Integration
Recent Publications
- Burns M.S., Miramontes R., Reidling J.C., Lim R.G., Thompson L.M., “Protocol to evaluate mouse brain spatial cell type-resolved transcriptomic discoveries using 10× Visium spatial transcriptomics and FLEX scRNA-seq” (opens in new tab), STAR Protocols, vol. 7, 2026.
- Ryan G. Lim, Osama Al-Dalahmah, Jie Wu, Maxwell P. Gold, Jack C. Reidling, Guomei Tang, Miriam Adam, David K. Dansu, Hye-Jin Park, Patrizia Casaccia, Ricardo Miramontes, Andrea M. Reyes-Ortiz, Alice Lau, Richard A. Hickman, Fatima Khan, Fahad Paryani, Alice Tang, Kenneth Ofori, Emily Miyoshi, Neethu Michael, et al., “Huntington disease oligodendrocyte maturation deficits revealed by single-nucleus RNAseq are rescued by thiamine-biotin supplementation” (opens in new tab), Nature Communications, vol. 13, 2023.
- Hernandez S.J., Lim R.G., Onur T., Dane M.A., Smith R., Wang K., Jean G.E.-H., Reyes-Ortiz A., Devlin K., Miramontes R., Wu J., Casale M., Kilburn D., Heiser L.M., Korkola J.E., Van Vactor D., Botas J., Thompson-Peer K.L., Thompson L.M., “An altered extracellular matrix–integrin interface contributes to Huntington’s disease-associated CNS dysfunction in glial and vascular cells” (opens in new tab), Human Molecular Genetics, vol. 32, pp. 1483-1496, 2023.
- Workman M.J., Lim R.G., Wu J., Frank A., Ornelas L., Panther L., Galvez E., Perez D., Meepe I., Lei S., Valencia V., Gomez E., Liu C., Moran R., Pinedo L., Tsitkov S., Ho R., Kaye J.A., Thompson T., Rothstein J.D., et al., “Large-scale differentiation of iPSC-derived motor neurons from ALS and control subjects” (opens in new tab), Neuron, vol. 111, pp. 1191-1204.e5, 2023.
- Ryan G. Lim, “Answer ALS, a large-scale resource for sporadic and familial ALS combining clinical and multi-omics data from induced pluripotent cell lines” (opens in new tab), Nature Neuroscience, vol. 25, pp. 226-237, 2022.
- The NeuroLINCS Consortium, “An integrated multi-omic analysis of iPSC-derived motor neurons from C9ORF72 ALS patients” (opens in new tab), iScience, vol. 24, 2021.
Most Cited Publications
- The LINCS Consortium, “The Library of Integrated Network-Based Cellular Signatures NIH Program: System-Level Cataloging of Human Cells Response to Perturbation” (opens in new tab), Cell Systems, vol. 6, pp. 13-24, 2018.
- Ryan G. Lim, Chris Quan, Andrea M. Reyes-Ortiz, Sarah E. Lutz, Amanda J. Kedaigle, Theresa A. Gipson, Jie Wu, Gad D. Vatine, Jennifer Stocksdale, Malcolm S. Casale, Clive N. Svendsen, Ernest Fraenkel, David E. Housman, Dritan Agalliu, Leslie M. Thompson, “Huntington's disease iPSC-derived brain microvascular endothelial cells reveal WNT-mediated angiogenic and blood-brain barrier deficits” (opens in new tab), Cell Reports, vol. 19, pp. 1365-1377, 2017.
- The HD iPSC Consortium, “Developmental alterations in Huntington's disease neural cells and pharmacological rescue in cells and mice” (opens in new tab), Nature Neuroscience, vol. 20, pp. 648-660, 2017.
- Workman M.J., Lim R.G., Wu J., Frank A., Ornelas L., Panther L., Galvez E., Perez D., Meepe I., Lei S., Valencia V., Gomez E., Liu C., Moran R., Pinedo L., Tsitkov S., Ho R., Kaye J.A., Thompson T., Rothstein J.D., et al., “Erratum: Large-scale differentiation of iPSC-derived motor neurons from ALS and control subjects (Neuron (2023) 111(8) (1191–1204.e5), (S089662732300034X), (10.1016/j.neuron.2023.01.010))” (opens in new tab), Neuron, vol. 113, pp. 2028, 2025.
Contact Information
Email: limrg@uci.edu
Phone: (949) 824-6756
Address: 3200 Gross Hall, Irvine, CA 92697-1705
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Last updated on 3/10/2026.