Hattie Chung, PhD, began her journey to becoming a scientist at the age of eight when she moved from Seoul, South Korea, to North Carolina. In South Korea, she aspired to a career as a fiction writer and often wrote poems and stories. However, as an English language learner in a new country, she found it challenging to carry on this interest. Instead, she took comfort and security in her math and science classes, which came more easily to her.
“Like many kids, I began to enjoy what I was good at,” Chung says.
While attending the North Carolina School of Science and Math, a public magnet high school, Chung and a few classmates participated in Duke University’s team for the International Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) competition. She worked with computer scientists and engineers in building circuits for cells, contributing to a burgeoning field known as synthetic biology.
“I was fortunate that iGEM was one of my first serious research experiences, because instead of working on a bread-and-butter area of science, I was part of an entirely new field of science,” says Chung. “Since then, I have always sought out mentors who were at the cutting edge. The experience dared me to do non-standard things.”
Her exposure to the synthetic biology community led her to study bioengineering at MIT. Throughout her bachelor’s degree, Chung explored different fields, considering careers in both entrepreneurship and international development. She spent two summers doing field work in Tanzania to support mental health initiatives. “I realized there that the desire to help is insufficient. You need to actually have something useful to give,” she reflects.
That realization led her to return to school for her PhD in systems biology at Harvard University, where she focused on pathogen evolutionary dynamics using computational genomics. Although she considered a career in biosecurity policy – even publishing a white paper on North Korea’s bioweapons that made it to the front page of the Washington Post – she decided that a scientific career was a better fit for her.
“I like to meander and see where my interests lead,” Chung says about her decision to pursue a career in academia. “I don’t always have a long-term plan, but I know my values: I want to work on things that excite me with excellent people. That’s my guiding beacon.”
After completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Chung joined the Yale School of Medicine faculty in 2024. She quickly set up her lab, which integrates computational biology, systems biology, and cutting-edge technologies to study cellular heterogeneity and tissue homeostasis in health and disease.
Her lab now has nearly a dozen members, including staff, students, and trainees. “Training PhD students is a core part of my mission. These students are very dedicated to research and understanding fundamental biology. I take pride in training all my students and postdocs in the most rigorous and cutting-edge capabilities,” Chung says. “It is a joy and privilege to have them come through the lab and watch them grow.”
Chung recently received her first award from the National Institutes of Health for a research project to understand how genetically identical cells respond differently to stimuli, such as treatments or environmental cues. Chung and her colleagues treat cells with diverse drugs and simultaneously measure intracellular regulatory proteins, including the direct drug targets, and the transcriptome over a longitudinal time course. Such multi-modal time-series measurements could lead to building better predictive models.
“I want to understand these cell behaviors more effectively with a mechanistic grounding, so that we can build better predictive models of cellular behaviors in response to different interventions, like therapeutics,” Chung says.
In addition to work supported by the grant, a major focus area of Chung’s lab is investigating tissue homeostasis in ovarian aging and cardiovascular disease. The ovary is one of the most dynamically remodeling organs in the human body. Her lab studies this as a model for how tissue-wide remodeling is impaired with age. Chung hopes this work will contribute to understanding why ovarian function is among the first to decline with age and reveal generalizable principles of inflammation and wound healing. Additionally, in collaboration with Yale cardiac surgeons, her lab investigates the multi-omic basis for heterogeneity across human vascular tissues in disease and how they could maintain resilience.
“As a scientist, I want to make sure the work I do is technically and computationally interesting and on the cutting edge,” says Chung. “At the same time, I hope my work helps answer interesting questions that can be meaningful to patients or the population at large.”