Chuan He, PhD

Chuan He, PhD, is the John T. Wilson Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Chemistry, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Chicago. He was born in China in 1972 and received his B.S. (1994) from the University of Science and Technology of China. He received his Ph. D. degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in chemistry in 2000 with Professor Stephen J. Lippard. After being trained as a Damon-Runyon postdoctoral fellow with Professor Gregory L. Verdine at Harvard University from 2000-2002, he joined the University of Chicago as an assistant professor and was promoted to associate professor in 2008 and full professor in 2010. He was selected as an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 2013. His research spans a broad range of epigenetics, biochemistry, molecular biology, chemical biology, cell biology, and genomics. His recent research concerns reversible RNA and DNA methylation in biological regulation. Chuan He’s laboratory discovered reversible RNA methylation as a new mechanism of gene expression regulation at the post-transcriptional level in 2011 and at the transcriptional level in 2020. Recent studies have demonstrated critical roles of RNA methylation in mammalian development and human diseases. He’s group also spearheaded the development of enabling technologies to study the biology of 5-hydroxymethylcytosine (5hmC) in mammalian genomes. He is the director of the Center for Dynamic RNA Epitranscriptomes at the University of Chicago, a NIH/NHGRI Center of Excellence in Genomic Science (CEGS). He is a winner of the 2017 Paul Marks Prize for Cancer Research and 2023 Wolf Prize in Chemistry.