Ludwig scientist Bing Ren elected fellow of AAAS

Ludwig scientist Bing Ren has been named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world's largest general scientific society. Election as a fellow is an honor bestowed upon AAAS members by their peers.

AAAS lauded Ren for his outstanding original contributions to the analysis of genome wide distributions of regulatory factors, transcriptional regulatory sequences and of the large scale organization of eukaryotic genomes. His research focuses on the growing understanding of the workings of the human genome and how to use that data to change the course of disease. His work has been at the forefront of mapping human DNA to yield the invaluable data needed to understand the genetic drivers of disease.

Ren received his PhD training in gene regulation from Tom Maniatis, PhD at Harvard University, then extended his research in genomics and global analysis of gene expression by working as a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Richard Young, PhD at Whitehead Institute. During this time he developed the ChIP-chip technology for studying in vivo transcription factor binding and chromatin modification states.

Since 2001, he has been a member of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research and a faculty member of the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine. His research is focused on genomic and epigenomic analyses of human embryonic stem cell differentiation and mammalian development. He has directed a Roadmap Epigenome Project to produce reference human epigenome maps since 2008. He is currently leading an ENCODE production project to annotate the mammalian transcriptional regulatory sequences.

Provided by Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research