Xiaohua Shen received her Ph.D. at the University of Michigan and did the postdoctoral training with Stuart Orkin at Harvard Medical School. 

Xiaohua Shen is a Professor and a Cheung Kong Scholar in the School of Medicine at Tsinghua University. Her major research is to understand how the non-coding portions of the genome influence chromatin structure, gene expression, and stem-cell fate in development. In the past years, the Shen lab has rigorously investigated novel aspects of ncRNAs, genomic repeats, and RNA-binding proteins in the regulation of transcription and chromatin. Her work facilitates the functional inference of ncRNA genes, and brings about a paradigm-shifted understanding of genomic repeats and their associated transcripts in organizing the genome and the higher-order chromatin structure.

A glimpse of the noncoding genomes in chromatin and transcription regulation

Much of the developmental complexity and biodiversity of higher eukaryotes is thought to arise from gene regulation. RNA represents a hidden layer of regulatory information in complex organisms. I will discuss our recent progress in exploring fundamental functions of genomic repeats, noncoding RNA, and RNA-binding protein in the regulation of transcription and genome organization.