Portrait of Chuan He

Science Breakthrough

Jason Smith

University of Chicago

Chuan He

  • 2023
  • Speaker
  • Life Sciences
  • 2023
  • Speaker
  • Circle
  • 2024
  • Jury
  • Life Sciences

Chuan He is the John T. Wilson Distinguished Service Professor and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator in the Department of Chemistry, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. He received his B.S. (1994) from the University of Science and Technology of China, his Ph. D. degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and was trained as a Damon-Runyon postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University from 2000-2002. Chuan He’s laboratory discovered reversible RNA methylation as a new mechanism of gene expression regulation at the post-transcriptional level in 2011 and at the transcriptional level in 2020. Recent studies have demonstrated critical roles of RNA methylation in mammalian development and human diseases. 

Chuan He was Falling Walls Science Breakthrough of the Year 2023 in the Life Sciences category.