Lani Wu

Dr. Lani Wu is a Professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Lani’s research focuses on understanding cell-fate decisions in healthy and diseased tissues.

Over the past two decades, the collaborative labs of Drs. Wu and Steven Altschuler have pioneered systems-biology approaches to disentangle phenotypic cellular heterogeneity and identify molecular mechanisms and design principles of biological networks. This work has led to new understandings of how cells and tissues create spatial patterns and cancer cells make cell fate decisions during and after drug treatment. Lani has increasingly focused on applying her discoveries and approaches to translational biomedical research, including co-founding Nine Square Therapeutics.

Lani received degrees in pure mathematics from the National Taiwan University (BA) and the University of California at San Diego (MA and PhD). She has held a number of academic positions, including at Princeton University, Harvard University and the University of Southwestern Medical Center, as well as industrial positions at Microsoft, Google and Rosetta Bioinformatics.