Team

Principal Investigator

Chuan-Hsiang (Bear) Huang, MD, PhD

Bear received an M.D. from National Taiwan University and Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. His Ph.D. work focused on structural studies of PI3Kα, one of the most frequently mutated proteins in human cancers and an important drug target. Using X-ray diffraction methods, Bear determined the first crystal structure of the PI3Kα heterodimer, elucidating the basis of PI3K over-activation in cancers. To further understand the cellular biology of PI3K signaling, Bear conducted his postdoctoral research in the Devreotes lab, studying the mechanism of cell migration and chemotaxis using Dictyostelium and human neutrophils as models. Bear combined single cell imaging with quantitative modeling to reveal the dynamic properties of the Ras-PI3K signaling network, how it couples to the cytoskeleton, and how chemotactic cues bias this coupling to guide movement. In 2016 Bear started his own lab in the Department of Pathology at Johns Hopkins where his team investigates the fundamental mechanisms of cell motility as well as implications in human diseases such as metastatic cancers.

Research Associate

Jr-Ming Yang, PhD

• B.S., National Taiwan University
• M.S., National Taiwan University
• Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

Postdoctoral Fellow

Wei-Yu (Jackie) Chi, MD

Wei-Yu joined our lab in 2019 after he received his M.D. from National Taiwan University. Having strong interests in basic research, he joined a lab at Academia Sinica and was involved in an epigenetic project previously. He is currently working on visualizing the spatio-temporal relationships of signal proteins with a TIRF or confocal microscope. He is also interested in data visualization and optimization of workflows and has set up a data processing workflow based on machine learning.