MIDWEST TAIWANESE BIOTECHNOLOGY - Key Persons
Dr. Alaarg was born to an Egyptian family in Saudi Arabia. He obtained his Master degree from the department of Pharmaceutics at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, where he worked under Dr. Wim Hennick in developing and applying anti-EGFR and anti-VEGFR nanobody- liposomes loaded with kinase inhibitor for cancer treatment. Subsequently, he moved to England and worked at the laboratory of Dr. Matthew Wood at the University of Oxford on the project investigating the use of extracellular vesicles as bioinspired drug delivery systems. He then pursued his doctoral degree at the department of pharmaceutical sciences at Twente University, Netherland. During his doctoral study, he worked in a multidisciplinary team conducting his research in both Netherland and the US at Utrecht University, Amsterdam Medical center, and Mount Sinai School of Medicine, NY under the supervision of Dr. Willem Mulder developing and applying novel targeted therapeutics for the treatment of an inflammatory disease- Atherosclerosis. After finishing his PhD in 2017, he soon joined AbbVie in North Chicago as a Senior scientist in the New Biological Entities Process Development Group working on the formulation of Parenteral Products, their scalability, and technology transfer to commercial manufacturing.
Dr. Chau-Ti Ting received her Ph.D. from National Taiwan University, Department of Plant Pathology and Entomology in 1997. During her Ph.D. training, she received a pre-doctoral fellowship from the Ministry of Education (Taiwan) and spent two years as a visiting student at the University of Chicago. She was trained and always considered herself as an evolutionary geneticist focusing on the genetic changes between closely related Drosophila species. She identified the first hybrid male sterility gene, Odysseus, in Drosophila and brought the speciation field into the molecular area. Her current works involve in the studies of genetic changes underlying sexual isolation of D. melanogaster. With the tools of population genomics, her group was able to identify several genetic variations contributing to sexual isolation in Drosophila. In addition to her primary interest in speciation, she also attempts to tackle how gene duplication plays a role in evolutionary innovation. Her recent work on polymorphic gene duplications reveals possible evolutionary inferences on the facts of duplications.
Dr. Che Liu, originally from Taipei, Taiwan, came to the U.S. in 2005. He is now a senior scientist at Arrowhead Pharmaceuticals, where he works on developing animal models for RNA interference drug targeting cancers. He also leads the Flow Cytometry Core at Arrowhead Pharmaceuticals. Before joining Arrowhead, Dr. Liu was a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He studied the roles of human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) in glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) and showed that HCMV infection increases the drug-resistance of GBM cells. Prior to moving up to Wisconsin, Dr. Liu studied his Ph.D. at the University of Florida in Biomedical Sciences, Physiology and Pharmacology concentration. There he investigated how chemokine receptors regulate the growth of GBM cells and the infiltration of tumor-associated immune cells. He received multiple awards, including UF-HHMI Science for Life Graduate Student Awards, Outstanding Achievement Award, McKnight Brain Institute Graduate Student Award, and UF Medical Guild Research Incentive Award.
Dr. Christine Shyu received her bachelor's degree in Agronomy from National Chung- Hsing University (Taiwan) and obtained a PhD degree in Plant Biology from Michigan State University in 2012. Her thesis focused on the molecular mechanism of JASMONATE ZIM-DOMAIN proteins in regulating jasmonate responses in Arabidopsis. After graduation, she continued to purse postdoctoral training in a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) lab located in the Department of Biology at University of Washington, Seattle, then transitioned to the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center (St. Louis) and worked as a USDA-NIFA Postdoctoral Fellow from 2014 to 2017. In this period, she further extended her research interest in jasmonate signaling into crop systems. The studies include utilizing CRISPR-Cas9 and Ac/Ds tagging to generate jasmonate signaling mutants in green millet and maize, building RNA-seq databases to study spatiotemporal transcriptional dynamics of jasmonate responses in green millet, and high throughput image analyses of abiotic stress responses in rice. In 2017, she joined Monsanto Company (Now Bayer Crop Science) as a Gene Editing Scientist. Her role involves leading and executing research projects to develop new technologies for gene editing and site-directed integration of transgene cassettes in corn and soybean.
Christine is passionate about improving modern agriculture through innovative science and dynamic collaborations. She actively participates in scientific outreach and communication events and welcomes conversations on GMO, gene editing and plant biotechnology. She is also a mother of a two-year-old son and enjoys maintaining a healthy and balanced lifestyle well spent with family while actively pursuing her scientific career.
Job Titles:
- Patent Lawyer / K & L Gates LLP
Dr. Melissa Haulcomb is an Intellectual Property Attorney at K&L Gates, LLP. K&L Gates is a full- service global firm, recently named the 13th largest firm in the world with attorneys across five continents. Representative clients include Duke Energy Corp., Baxter International Inc., CBS Corp., Wells Fargo, Starbucks Corp., Sprint Nextel Corp., and Microsoft Corp. Dr. Haulcomb focuses her practice on prosecution for domestic and international patent applications as well as intellectual property litigation, including patent, trademark and copyright infringement. In addition, Dr. Haulcomb is fortunate to have the opportunity to devote time to pro bono matters, which provides legal services for the public good, such as representing individuals in asylum cases before the U.S. Immigration Court.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor / Case Western Reserve University
Dr. Stanley Huang obtained his bachelor degree in Chemistry, and master degree in Microbiology from Chung- Yuan Christian University and Chang Gung University, Taiwan respectively. In 2010, Stanley received his Ph.D. degree in Molecular & Cellular Biology from Imperial College London, UK; then joined the laboratory of Professor Edward Pearce as an American Heart Association Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Pathology & Immunology at Washington University School of Medicine, where he worked to understand how the cytokine signaling and metabolic reprogramming dictate immunological fate of macrophages in infection and the tumor microenvironment. In late 2015, he joined the laboratory of Professor Marco Colonna at the Department of Pathology and Immunology at Washington University School of Medicine. There, he investigated the regulation between cell activation and metabolic network of group 3 innate lymphoid cells (ILC3s) in the pathogenesis of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Stanley is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pathology at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, his lab is aiming to understand the molecular mechanisms of innate immunity that control inflammatory states, with a particular focus on elucidating how different cellular signaling and metabolic pathways are rewired to fine-tune immune cell activation and function in response to inflammatory diseases and cancer (https://stanhuang-lab.com).
Dr. Wei-Shou Hu is a Taiwanese-American chemical engineer, and he has been a professor in the department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at the University of Minnesota since 1983. He earned his bachelor degree in Agricultural Chemistry from National Taiwan University in 1974 and his doctoral degree in Biochemical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1983. His work covers areas including modeling and controlling cell metabolism, glycosylation modulation, and process data mining; he has helped shape the advances of biopharmaceutical process technology. His current research emphasizes employing genomic and proteomic tools in his research projects.
Dr. Hu thinks he graduated at the right time of the biotech explosion (the 1980s), and he initiated the Engineering Foundation Conferences on Cell Culture Engineering soon after he started his academic career. The conference has been among the most relevant forum of cell bioprocessing for biologics. When asked about the work-life balance, Dr. Hu pointed out that it depends on each person's value and sense of fulfillment. It is important to find a workplace that let you accomplish that. Also, a successful graduate student is not one who works long hours, but one works efficiently and resourcefully. One should keep in mind an important aspect of graduate student training is also to perform well under pressure or during the critical time. Presentation skill and embracing collaborations are the essential training in Dr. Hu's lab, and he also encourages his students to be generous, be good human beings in addition to being good scientists. As he has already built the reputation and connection within the industry, he emphasized the importance of "networking". We look forward to learning more about Dr. Hu's career development, the relationship he cultivated with the industry, and his recommendations for current graduate students!
Job Titles:
- Senior Research Scientist
In 2014, Dr. Huang joined Eli Lilly & Company in Indianapolis, IN as a Research Scientist providing strategic epidemiology and risk management planning to support global product development, including study design, implementation and analysis of observational studies using real-world data. She serves as an in-house subject matter expert in epidemiology to contribute to other activities such as regulatory submission documents, regulatory response documents, safety signal management, and post-approval safety studies. In 2016, Dr. Huang was promoted to Senior Research Scientist.
Job Titles:
- Co - Founder
- Co - Founder of Scismic
Elizabeth Wu is a co-founder of Scismic. During her time as a life scientist in academia and industry, she witnessed the challenges that researchers face in finding a work environment that fits their professional skills and development needs. Leveraging her extensive experience in creating personal and professional development programs for community groups, she cofounded Scismic to address these challenges. She has done extensive research on how recruiters and hiring managers evaluate candidates during CV screening and interviews. Previously, she worked as a Research Associate at Translate Bio, an mRNA therapeutics company, and as a Lab Manager at Harvard University.
Job Titles:
- Principle Scientist / Becton, Dickinson and Company
Dr. Zook received her bachelor degree in Biology from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a PhD degree in Immunology and Aging from Loyola University Chicago in 2012. Her dissertation topic was examining how aging affects the immune system, particularly by employing a novel transgenic mouse model to study the role of FOXN1 in maintaining T cell development with age. She then continued to pursue her post-doctoral training in University of Chicago and her research interests focused on the regulation of E and ID proteins in innate lymphoid cell development and NK cell biology.
Combining the scientific skills and the experiences of team lead as well as project management acquired from academic research training, in 2016, she joined Astellas Pharma as a Senior Scientist then moved to BD and worked as a Principal Scientist. Her work incudes managing and supporting multiple projects including designing clinical trials, developing pre-clinical models to test compound safety and efficacy, and providing scientific support for business strategy and regulatory filings. She is now part of Medical Affairs supporting Infection Prevention at BD.
Dr. HaoFan Peng is a senior engineer in Biogen focusing on biologics process development in Multiple Sclerosis, Hemophilia, and Alzheimer. His main role is to ensure large scale manufacturing's success in upstream and downstream as well as in clinical and commercial campaign (2,000 L to 15,000 L). He also supported next generation facility design focusing on continuous perfusion process. He leads several cross-company projects including CMO partnership, raw material investigation, cell line robustness, medium optimization, instrument automation, product quality comparability, assay alignment in BIIB's internal high titer development. Aside from the lab, he works closely with external partners in supporting domestic or international vendor qualification, raw material analysis and trace metal impurity to ensure supply chain consistency. Eric published several papers in mitigating the cell damaging and raw material qualification in collaboration with AD, QC, regulatory, supply chain, and external partners/vendors. He obtained his BS degree in National Taiwan University and PhD in SUNY Buffalo in gene therapy, regenerative medicine and preclinical animal model.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor / University of Chicago
Dr. Heng-Chi Lee received his bachelor's degree in life science program from National Yang-Ming University in Taiwan and his Ph.D. in genetics and development from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in 2008. He then became a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Craig Mello's lab at University of Massachusetts Medical School. Currently, he is an assistant professor in the Molecular genetics and cell biology department at Chicago University from 2016.
Recently, Dr. Lee's research interest is understanding how small non-coding RNA regulates gene expression and promotes genome stability. He used C. elegans as a model organism and showed that P-element induced wimpy testis (PIWI) protein binds PIWI-interacting RNA (piRNA), and the piRNA complex played critical roles in silencing foreign nucleic acids such as transposons or viruses to reduce the possibility of gene mutation. He further demonstrated that piRNA is able to silence its targets over multiple generations. His research findings have been published in several prestigious journals including Molecular Cell, Nature and Cell. This year Dr. Lee published an article in Science about how does piRNA distinguish endogenous from foreign nucleic acids. He provided a novel solution to achieve transgene expression (e.g. GFP labeling) in the germline by avoiding piRNA recognition and degradation.
Job Titles:
- President of Pioneer Scientific Solution, LLC
Dr. Yang currently serves as the president of Pioneer Scientific Solution, LLC., and the Editor for "Durability and Reliability of Polymers and Other Materials in Photovoltaic Modules", and has been served as the technical consultant for Far East Enterprises, GAF Materials Corp., Niagara Bottles, Deatak Inc. China National Key Laboratory of Environmental Adaptability, and Medical Chain International (MCI) . His research and consulting areas cover polymers/materials for biomedical devices, medication delivery, ophthalmic optical lenses, flammability, and biofuels.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor / Purdue University
Dr. Huang obtained his B.S. in Agricultural Machinery Engineering and M.S. degree in Food Science and Technology at National Taiwan University. After completed Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering at University of Cambridge, UK, He moved to Singapore and studied nanomaterials from food packaging at the National University of Singapore. In 2016, Dr. Huang joined Purdue University as an assistant professor. His research interest includes the studying of food life cycle assessment and methodologies to enhance the sustainability of food processing. He demonstrated that the nanocomposite food-packaging film can decrease oxygen permeability and reduce the oxidation of ascorbic acid and lycopene in tomato paste. Recently he showed that LED light exposure can induce the maturation and ripening of bananas; furthermore, the accumulations of nutrient including ascorbic acid, phenols, and sugars in banana fruit were increased as well.
Dr. Chang received her Bachelor degree in Genetics from University of Wisconsin, Madison in 2006. She then went on to pursue her doctoral degree at Loyola University Chicago in Physiology where she focused on investigating GPCR-mediated signaling in cardiac hypertrophy and heart failure. During her doctoral training, she also obtained a certificate in Business Development from Graduate School of Management at University of California, Davis where she conducted market analysis for strategy implementation and led a team competing in an in-vitro platform technology development for heart failure patients. After obtaining her doctoral degree in 2012, she joined the laboratory of Dr. Leigh Griffiths at University of California, Davis as a post-doctoral fellow where she focused her research on the application of stem cell immunotherapy in cardiac vascular diseases. During her postdoctoral training, she also served as an account manager in Madison House LLC helping to identify client's medical care services, serving as a primary liaison for inquires from clients, representative and healthcare professionals. In 2016, Dr. Chang joined Novartis as a Medical Science Liaison for Cardiovascular department serving CO,UT,WY and ID area. She takes on a multifunctional role where she participates in clinical education, data sharing, research discussion and maintaining communication between the healthcare provide and the patient supporting the late phase clinical trial activities within heart failure and cardiovascular diseases.
Johanna Lee obtained a bachelor degree in Biochemical Science and Technology from National Taiwan University in 2006 and a Ph.D. degree in Cell and Molecular Biology from Baylor College of Medicine in 2012. Her Ph.D. research focused on understanding the molecular mechanisms of the RNA-dominant disease myotonic dystrophy type 1, and developing alternative therapeutic strategies for the disease.
After graduation, Johanna joined the Johns Hopkins Univeristy Science Writing online program and transitioned into a career in science writing. She currently works as a Science Writer at Promega Corporation. Her job involves writing and reviewing promotional content in support of Promega products and services. This includes product web pages, social media posts, blogs, technical manuals, feature articles, tradeshows, webinars, and media advertisements.
Dr. Li-Hao (Paul) Huang received his B.S. at National Taiwan University, Chemistry Department, and continued to pursuit his Ph.D. at Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, Biochemistry Department, where he studied ACAT1 gene in macrophages in atherosclerosis. His post-doctoral training, with Dr. Gwendalyn Randolph at Washington University School of Medicine, Pathology and Immunology Department, made him committed to focus on his long term goal, after he becomes an independent faculty, in understanding interstitial lipoprotein trafficking through lymphatic vasculature, the process mediated by immune responses, in human diseases. His ultimate goal is to inspire trainees to continue the research path so as to make exciting and significant discoveries. Throughout his career up until this point, Paul have published 18 publications, including 6 first authored research articles, 2 first and co-corresponding authored reviews, and 2 patent applications. He has received 18 awards, including an American Heart Association Career Development Award, been invited or selected for 19 oral presentations at national conferences, and served or will serve in several leadership positions, including one as a 2020 Chair of the Lipoprotein Gordon Research Seminar. Paul also has been a happy Tzu-Chi volunteer for over 10 years; he enjoys growing at the same time sharing along the way of life.
Meng-Chuan is Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto and as a Staff Psychiatrist of Centre for Addiction and Mental Health & the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. He completed his training of medical doctor in the National Taiwan University and received postgraduate clinical training in both adult and child/adolescent psychiatry in the Department of Psychiatry, National Taiwan University Hospital. His clinical interests are in autism and related neurodevelopmental conditions, and adolescent mental health, sexual identity, and gender development, and resilience. He performed his Ph.D. and postdocs research at the Cambridge University Autism Research Centre.
During his Ph.D. training, he focused on disentangling the complex relationship between sex/gender and autism at the cognitive and neuroimaging levels, and also extended his interest into social attitude/stereotype formation in people with autism. His current research focuses on elucidating the heterogeneity of autism by contrasting various subgroups. Meng-Chuan initiated the Female AIMS (Autism Imaging Multicentre Study) project to complement the male AIMS study conducted with MRC support, and continuously collaborate with the Autism Research Centre.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor / University of Illinois
Dr. Nien-Pei Tsai received his Ph.D. from University of Minnesota and his postdoctoral training at UT Southwestern Medical Center. Since 2014, he is appointed as an assistant professor in Department of Molecular and Integrative Physiology at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has published multiple significant papers in journals such as Cell, Neuron, Nature Neuroscience, PNAS, and EMBO J. He has also received multiple awards, been appointed in journals' editorial boards, and served as a chair in the annual meeting in Society of Neuroscience.
Dr. Tsai is currently interested in understanding the molecular mechanism underlying excitability homoeostasis in neurological disorders, including epilepsy and autism spectrum disorders. Various approaches including molecular and cell biology, biochemistry, electrophysiology, and mouse genetics were applied in his lab. Two particular areas on which he focuses are the ubiquitin proteasome system and protein translation control in neuronal excitability regulation.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor / University of Michigan
Richard Liang's research career focuses on human disease modeling to decipher the molecular mechanisms of pathogenesis. His early scientific achievements include the establishment of the in vitro scratch assay for cancer research, the generation of the first autophagosome & dystonia animal model, and the discovery of a novel mechanism driving developmental neurodegeneration. At present, he is collaborating with bioinformaticians to identify biomarkers and therapeutic targets for developing suitable preventive interventions for the dystonia patients. He served as an Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee to supervise all operating research in 10 vertebrate species at the Uni- versity of Michigan for 3 years. He is a current editorial board member of Scientific Reports.
Dr. Jin received his undergraduate degree in Applied Mathematics at the National Chiao Tung University and a Master's degree in Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He completed his Ph.D. with Alison Goate and Carlos Cruchaga at Washington University in St. Louis and a post-doctoral training with Richard Lifton at Yale and Rockefeller. Supported by a K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award from NHLBI, he is currently in transition to his new role as an assistant professor on the tenure track in the Department of Genetics at Washington University School of Medicine and will start his independent lab in April of 2020.
He was the lead computational biologist for the whole exome/genome sequencing and array genotyping analysis working groups in the Pediatric Cardiac Genomics Consortium and the International Cerebral Palsy Genomics Consortium. He developed a novel control-free statistical framework and applied this methodology to a whole exome sequencing dataset of 2,871 congenital heart disease (CHD) probands to demonstrate that 1.8% of cases are attributed to rare transmitted mutations (Nature Genetics 2017). He also led genomic analysis and methodology development in several genetic studies of complex diseases, including congenital hydrocephalus, Vein of Galen malformation, Chiari malformation, trigeminal neuralgia, Dent disease, arachnoid cyst, nephrotic syndrome, and congenital hemangioma, for the Yale Center for Mendelian Genomics.
Tak-Yee Lee, Ph.D., is an experienced pharmaceutical scientist and leader in new drug and generic drug development. His pharmaceutical product development experience extends from new drug discovery interface to commercial product introduction. Tak retired from Osmotica Pharmaceuticals in 2016 as Vice President, Portfolio and Operations where he oversaw product development and manufacturing functions. Before Osmotica, Tak worked for several companies throughout his career, ranging from start-up biotech to pharma companies. His roles included technical and managerial responsibilities in the areas of drug product development, analytical development, production quality control, clinical manufacturing, and pharmaceutical device development. He was Executive Director, Worldwide Pharmaceutical Sciences at Pfizer, Senior Director of Pharmaceutical Development at Aronex Pharmaceuticals, and technical and leadership roles in other pharmaceutical companies. Tak received his B.S. in Pharmacy from National Taiwan University in 1978 and his Ph.D. in Pharmaceutics and Pharmaceutical Chemistry from The Ohio State University in 1986.
Job Titles:
- Director of Analytical R & D at Abbvie
Dr. Ju received his Ph.D. degree in Chemical Engineering from Stanford University. After graduation, he joined Pharmacia & Upjohn and started his career as a formulation scientist in the pharmaceutical industry. He became a group leader and director, and has been leading formulation and dissolution method development in several companies, including Amgen, Abbott, and Abbvie.
Dr. Ju is currently the director of Analytical R&D at Abbvie, Chicago. Meanwhile, he has been engaged in national and international pharmaceutical organizations, including serving as a chair of two groups at IQ consortium, with a mission to advance technology that benefits patients and the broader R&D community. He is passionate about industry-regulator-academic interactions and facilitated several conferences. He has been driving innovation and stays active in presentation, publication, and patent applications. As part of his extensive leadership experience, Dr. Ju has also been involved in recruiting and talent management. Outside work, he enjoys coaching, working out in the gym, playing drums, cooking, reading novels, and travelling.
Dr. Tsu-Hsuan Huang received his Ph.D. from University of California, Los Angeles and his postdoctoral training at University of California, San Francisco and M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. Then he decides to join pharmaceutical company, including Amgen and Abbive. Now he is the group leader in Immuno-oncology discovery at Abbive and Adjunct Assistant Professor at Northwestern University. He conducts innovative research in cytokine fusion antibodies, cancer cell signaling and cancer immunotherapy that have been testified by numerous awards, patent, scientific publications, and government/private research funding.
Dr. Huang is the inventor of the tumor-targeting antibodies and IFN-α fusion technology that has been licensed to pharmaceutical companies for clinical development. He currently interested in developing next-generation tumor immunotherapy that combines data mining in bioinformatics. He supervises and coordinates multidisciplinary teams to generate lead immune-oncology therapeutics for clinical development.
Job Titles:
- Distinguished Research Fellow
Dr. Wen-Hsiung Li received his Ph.D. in applied mathematics at Brown University in 1972. Next year he joined The University of Texas Health Science Center as an assistant professor in population genetics, and he was appointed as a professor in 1984. Since 1998 he has been the James Watson Chair Professor of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago, and he was the Director at the Biodiversity Research Center, Academia Sinica from 2008 to 2016. Dr. Li is currently an academician of Academia Sinica, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and National Academy of Sciences.
Before 1979, Dr. Li focused on population genetics and studied genetic differences between populations. In late 1970's, DNA sequencing technologies were developed and applied to obtain DNA sequencing data. As a pioneer of DNA sequencing evolution, Dr. Li decided to devote himself to studying the evolutionary biology using DNA sequencing data, and he utilized the molecular clock model to analyze and calculate the evolutionary distance between species. Later, Dr. Li's group investigated the evolution of gene regulation in yeast strains and species, avian evolutionary genetics and genomics, and the transforming C4 genes into the rice genome. In 2003, Dr. Li received the International Balzan Prize for Genetics and Evolution, and he was the third recipient and first Chinese scientist to receive this honor. In 2009, he became the first Asian scientist to receive the Mendel Lecture and Medal from the Genetics Society in the UK for his contribution to genetics and evolutionary study.
Dr. Yen-Lian Liu received his B.S. degree in Life Science and M.S. degree in Biomedical Engineering from National Taiwan University. His master's thesis was focused on lung tissue engineering and alveolar angiogenesis. He also participated in clinical research of stem cell therapy for knee cartilage regeneration. In 2018, he received his Ph.D. degree in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on the instrumentation of an advanced fluorescence microscope and its application in cancer diagnostics. He is also the co-founder of Texas Taiwanese Biotechnology Association (TTBA) and the President of 2017. After publishing 21 SCI journal articles across the fields of optics, biophysics, DNA sensor, biomaterials, cancer therapy, and stem cell, in 2019, he was awarded the Young Scholar Fellowship Program (Columbus project) and started his laboratory at China Medical University in Taiwan. Now his research focuses on 1) Tumor organoid-based high-content screening system using multiphoton imaging; 2) Single- particle/molecule tracking of biomolecules in living cells 3) Biomaterials, tissue engineering, and regenerative medicine.
Dr. Ying-Hui Fu obtained her bachelors degree in Food Science from National Chung-Hsing University and a PhD degree in biochemistry and molecular biology from Ohio State University. After post-doctoral training at Ohio State University and Baylor College of Medicine, she worked as a scientist in Millennium Pharmaceutical Inc. and Darwin Molecular Corp. for four years before she transitioned back to academia as an Associate Professor in the Department of Neurobiology at the University of Utah. She moved to the University of California San Francisco in 2002 and has been a full Professor there since 2006.
At Baylor, Dr. Fu pioneered the field of trinucleotide repeat expansions (TNRs) as a cause of human disease. She identified the mutations underlying Fragile X mental retardation and then went on to clone the myotonic dystrophy gene. She showed that expanded trinucleotide repeats can be disease causing and that they are unstable and can expand in passage through meiosis. Together, this work defined TNR expansions as the molecular basis of the clinical phenomenon of "anticipation".
Dr. Fu is a leader and pioneer in the field of sleep and circadian rhythm research. Dr. Fu's research uses human genetics combined with multiple model organisms to investigate molecular mechanisms of human conditions. Her laboratory has been focusing on myelin biology, circadian rhythm and sleep behaviors. Her chief discoveries include describing Mendelian sleep phenotypes, identifying causative genes and mutations for circadian rhythm variants in the general population, and characterizing genetic forms of demyelinating degenerative disorders. Since circadian rhythm and sleep homeostasis are intimately connected with many physiological pathways including metabolism, immune function, brain health and mood regulation, her research will also shed new light on how sleep schedule and sleep homeostasis can impact health and disease. As a result of her accomplishments, she has been elected to Academia Sinica, the National Academy of Medicine, and the National Academy of Sciences.
Dr. Yun-Chu Chen obtained her bachelor's degree in Physics from National Tsing Hua University, her MPhil degree in biophysics from the University of Manchester in the UK, and her PhD degree in Chemistry from the University of Bath in the UK. She is currently a post-doctoral research associate in the Department of Industrial and Physical Pharmacy at Purdue University in the USA. She works in a multidisciplinary team and leads an independent project which covers investigating surface modification methods and Hot Melt Extrusion (HME) materials for an anti-biofouling continuous subcutaneous insulin infusion (CSII) devices, and developing sustained drug delivery systems that deliver anti-inflammatory drugs at the injection site to meet industrial partner's requirement of preventing tissue responses that leads to the blockade of infusion flow.
She was awarded with the Taiwan Ministry of Science and Technology's LiFT program (Leader in Future Trands) in 2017, which encouraged her to bring her professional expertise of cross-disciplinary projects in the biomedicine field in the industrial and academic areas to Taiwan.
Yung-Tsen Chen received her Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Chicago in August 2018. She also holds an M.S. in Clinical Psychology from Eastern Michigan University and a B.S. in Psychology from National Taiwan University. Prior to coming to UChicago, Yung-Tsen worked as a psychotherapist in psychology clinics with a specialization in adults and the elderly. Her dissertation, "Effect of Aging Stereotype Activation on Older Adults' Memory and Neural Activity", and continuing research investigate the impact of social and psychological factors on memory performance, the neural mechanisms of memory formation/distortion, and the differences between younger and older adults' memory using a combination of behavioral paradigms, brain stimulation technique, and/or functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). As a Social Sciences Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago, she teaches in the Psychology Department as well as the College's Social Science Core Sequence "Mind." Yung-Tsen also attended LiFT 2.0 program in June 2019 in Taiwan.