Chuan He

Dr. Chuan He is the John T. Wilson Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Chemistry, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and Institute for Biophysical Dynamics at the University of Chicago. He received his B.S. from the University of Science and Technology of China in 1994. He received his Ph.D. in chemistry from Massachusetts Institute of Technology 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 to 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. He is also a member of the Cancer Research Center at the University of Chicago. His research spans a broad range of epigenetics, chemical biology, biochemistry, molecular biology, cell biology and genomics. His recent research concerns reversible RNA and DNA methylation in biological regulation. Chuan He’s laboratory has spearheaded development of enabling technologies to study the biology of 5-hydroxymethylcytosine (5hmC) in mammalian genomes. His laboratory made the original discovery of reversible RNA methylation. His subsequent work helped to demonstrate that RNA methylation represents a new mechanism for gene expression regulation.