As a doctoral student with Dr. Jindong Zhao at Peking University, I received training in genetics and molecular biology while studying aspects of nitrogen fixation in cyanobacteria (blue-green algae). My work provided important insights into the genetic control of heterocyst differentiation and the nature of support activities important for nitrogen fixation, led to seven publications, including three leading-author original research articles in internationally renowned journals (PNAS 2006, Plant Cell Physiol. 2007 and Mol. Microbiol. 2007). The potential impact of my work on crop health and productivity was recognized by two national awards from the P.R.C., a First-Class Natural Science Award from the Ministry of Education in 2006 and a Second-Class National Award for Natural Science in 2007.
After graduation, I was eager to learn new skill sets of biochemistry to “unlock” the black box between genotype and phenotype and to define mechanisms at the molecular level. Also, I had been determined to pursue research in cancer biology to improve patient care ever since my father succumbed to stomach cancer at the age of 54. Being motivated by these aspirations, I joined Dr. Patrick Sung’s laboratory at Yale as a postdoctoral associate, where I developed expertise in DNA repair enzymology and cell biology while pursuing studies directed at delineating the mechanistic underpinnings of the chromosome damage repair pathway that depends on the tumor suppressors BRCA1 and BRCA2. At Yale, I made great strides in defining the multi-faceted roles of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 complexes in chromosome damage repair and in tumor suppression, and my research has been published in high-impact journals, including first-author papers in Nature (2017; highlighted in Nature News & Views; attracted 68 media attention; ranked within the top 1% of over 324,000 research articles of a similar age, and will be featured in an upcoming PBS documentary), Nature Structural Molecular Biology (2017), Molecular Cell (2015; selected as the cover story), and Nucleic Acids Research (2014, 2015a & 2015b) and as a co-author on papers in Science (2016), Molecular Cell (2016), Cell Reports (2014), and Nature (2010). Our scientific contributions and breakthrough for understanding BRCA1/2 led to an invited review article on the topic in Annual Review of Biochemistry (2019) on which I was first and a corresponding author. I was the first researcher to develop insect and 293-F cell-based expression and purification systems to obtain large quantities of highly purified, monodispersed BRCA2 and BRCA1 complexes for mechanistic studies. As such, my laboratory is uniquely positioned to leverage our expertise in biochemical reconstitution of complex reactions and cellular assays for deciphering the BRCA1/2 tumor suppressor network. These projects will provide actionable information to evaluate the pathogenicity of BRCA1/2 mutations, to explain the basis of innate and acquired drug resistance, and will identify targets for the development of new cancer therapeutics.
To date, I have published 42 articles with 37 research papers in total, many in prestigious journals, and have been cited more than 2,430 times, with an H-index of 23. At Yale, I also accrued a great deal of leadership experience in conceiving, designing, and supervising the studies (see Table 1). As such, I was the corresponding author on two publications in Nucleic Acids Research (2015) and Nature (2017). Notably, I received the 2018 prestigious “The Youth 1000 Talent Award” from the People’s Republic of China to support the establishment of a research laboratory and my faculty appointment at Peking-Tsinghua University Joint Center for Life Sciences (*I declined this award in order to accept my current faculty position). After my independence at UT Health San Antonio, we have published 14 papers, including three corresponding author publications (Annual Review of Biochemistry (2019), Journal of Cell Biology (2020), and Methods Molecular Biology (2021)) and have two senior author manuscripts under revision (EMBO Journal and Molecular Cell).
I am now an Assistant Professor on the tenure track and have been provided with a generous multi-year faculty setup package and substantial research space (~1,100 square feet) and resources to enable me to develop a high-impact research program in understanding BRCA1/2 biology and the implications of BRCA1 mutations in triple-negative breast cancer development. I am currently mentoring 4 postdoc fellows (Dr. Meiling Wang, Yuxin Huang, Dauren Alimbetov, and Wenjing Li) and one PhD student (O’Taveon Fitzgerald, a minority of African- American) and have made great progress in our research. I am a member of the NCI-designated Mays Cancer Center, and this offers me opportunities for collaboration with other cancer researchers and oncologists to efficiently translate our basic science discoveries into practice. Of note, I have received a Rising STARs Award from The University of Texas System (2019), a V Scholar Award from the V Foundation (2019), a Max and Minnie Tomerlin Voelcker Fund Young Investigator Award (2020), a CPRIT High-Impact/High-Risk Research Award, a RO1 Award (R01GM141091, 2021) and a Research Scholar Grant (RSG-22-721675-01- DMC, 2023) as PI and a MPI RO1 Award (R01CA268641, 2022) as Co-PI to support our ongoing multiple BRCA1/2 projects mentioned above, including the ubiquitin E3 ligase activity of BRCA1-BARD1. Specifically, I am very pleased to continue my productive collaborations with the Mazin lab and other PPG investigators. I have ample qualifications to serve as Co-leader of Project 3 in this PPG application.