Wulan Deng Lab

Wulan Deng received her B.S. in Biological Science from Peking University in 2006, and Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from University of Pennsylvania in 2012. From 2013 to 2019 she did her postdoctoral research at the Janelia Research Campus of Howard Hughes Medical Institute and later at University of California, Berkeley, during which she was honored as a Helen Hay Whitney Fellow (2014-2017). She was awarded with multiple honors including UPenn President Gutmann Leadership Award, CHOP Distinguished Research Trainee Award, and the ASH Merit Award. She published her findings at top journals such as Cell, PNAS, Science, and Blood. She joined Peking University as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in August 2019.

Dr. Deng has been focusing on uncovering the regulation mechanisms of gene expression that controls cell fates. With cross-disciplinary approaches, she has made several important findings: for the first time she precisely manipulated the fine spatial organization of chromatin at an endogenous locus and thus controlled gene transcription activity; she developed a novel CRISPR-based method for fluorescently labeling genomic DNA in situ (named as CASFISH); she applied single molecule microscopy for tracking transcription factors in living cells and revealed unique single molecule properties of key transcription factors that are essential for hESC differentiation to definitive endoderm. Her research team uses a combination of single molecule fluorescent microscopy and genomic approaches to investigate the spatial and temporal dynamics of transcription regulation events, and integrates information from DNA sequences, epigenetic traits, and chromatin spatial organization, in order to discover new mechanisms of transcription regulation and chromatin regulation in development and diseases.