In February this year, Dr. Siyuan (Steven) Wang received the BPS Early Career Award in Physical Cell Biology for his work in the field of genomics. The award is given to an outstanding early career principal investigator who aims to understand how biological systems operate on a physical level. Dr. Wang’s research investigates a new frontier in genetics: 3D genomics, an essential field for further understanding how the regulation of gene expression can play a role in instances of disease. The award is sponsored by the Physical Cell Biology subgroup of the Biophysical Society, an organization founded in 1958 to promote and foster knowledge about biophysics.
As a postdoctoral student, Dr. Wang pioneered chromatin tracing, an image-based technique that allows for the tracing, on multiple levels, of the 3D folding organization of DNA inside the nucleus. Now as a professor of genetics and of cell biology at the Yale School of Medicine, Dr. Wang’s lab is making strides in multiple fields, including the genomic profiling of cancer cells. The techniques used here are also at work in Dr. Wang’s work related to other novel research directions, including the identification of 3D genome regulators for therapeutic development, regeneration and cellular senescence in the liver, and antibody development and somatic hypermutation in the germinal center. These pursuits are made more accessible to researchers like Dr. Wang thanks to spatial-omics and spatial biology platforms.
Dr. Wang comes to Yale from the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University. In his next five years as a PI, he hopes to become a leader in the field of 3D genome organization, especially in terms of elucidating new insights into disease. When it comes to his fellow early career PIs, Dr. Wang’s advice is simply to embrace collaboration, remarking, “I’m amazed by the new chromatin folding discoveries that my colleagues are doing.” Even with an eye towards working with other researchers, chromatin discoveries continue to emerge in Dr. Wang’s own lab, which recently celebrated the thesis defense of its first PhD student, Dr. Miao Liu, whose work in the lab has examined chromatin tracing in mammalian tissue. Dr. Wang looks forward to the defense of his second doctoral student later this month. These pursuits are made more accessible to researchers like Dr. Wang thanks to spatial-omics and spatial biology platforms."