Bio:
Jun Lu, PhD is an Associate Professor and the Vice Chair of Diversity in the Department of Genetics at Yale University. Dr. Lu is a Core Member of the Yale Stem Cell Center. He is also a Member of Yale Center for RNA Science and Medicine, Yale Cancer Center, and Yale Cooperative Center of Excellence in Hematology. Since joining the faculty of Yale, Dr. Lu has established a hybrid laboratory, leveraging his expertise in both experimental biology and in computational biology. Dr. Lu and his laboratory have identified miRNA-mediated control of hematopoietic stem cells and revealed miRNA-based regulation of leukemia initiation and progression. His laboratory is also the first to show that mutations of clonal hematopoiesis can lead to anti-cancer effects, using TET2 as an example. This finding has helped to spark a series of work from the field on investigating the link between clonal hematopoiesis and immune dysregulation in cancer. More recently, his laboratory is the first to reveal a major function of cell surface glycosylated RNAs, in the setting of neutrophil biology. In addition to addressing biological questions, Dr. Lu’s laboratory has developed new technologies and computational tools to understand small RNA functions and their expression in single cells. Dr. Lu was a Scholar of the William Guy Forbeck Research Foundation and an Alexander and Margaret Stewart Trust Fellow.