Haiqing Xu

Haiqing is a Postdoctoral Fellow jointly advised by Dmitri Petrov and Monte Winslow (2022-now). He was trained as a yeast evolutionary biologist and is now interested in cancer evolution. During his Ph.D. at Dr. Jianzhi Zhang’s lab, he investigated the molecular evolution of gene expression, where he explored the molecular determinants, fitness effects, and evolutionary consequences of noise and errors in eukaryotic gene expression through both wet lab and computational approaches. This led to several first-author publications on the evolution of genome organization,  the evolution of intergenic transcription, and the evolution of genetic code.

For his postdoc, he will leverage theoretical, computational, and genomic approaches within in vivo cancer models to build the first in vivo functional genomic landscape of lung adenocarcinoma, which will provide novel insights into the intricate interactions between gene dosage and tumorigenesis, as well as cellular context and cancer vulnerabilities.