MILES Seminar - Prof. Jiandong Huang

Prof. Huang earned his BS degree from Fudan University, and earned his PhD degree from the University of California, Los Angeles. Thereafter, Prof. Huang received his postdoctoral training in mouse genetics at National Cancer Institute, NIH in the USA. During this period, Prof. Huang was the first to report that the two major intracellular transportation systems of mammalian cells, the microtubule- and actin-filament-based system directly interact with each other through their motor proteins, kinesin and myosin. Prof. Huang is now the Chair Professor of Synthetic Biology and the L & T Charitable Foundation Professor in Biomedical Sciences in the School of Biomedical Sciences, the University of Hong Kong.

Prof. Huang's current research focuses on two areas: synthetic biology and intracellular transportation. For intracellular transportation study, Prof. Huang has focused on illustrating the functions of a microtuble-based motor molecular, Kinesin-1, in different cell types, aiming at understanding its roles in different cell types in development and disease. For synthetic biology, Prof. Huang have created novel genetic circuits for the control of gene expression and hence biological behavior. Most recently, his team further engineered the interactions among multiple cell types to generate biological structures.