Lab news

06/16/2026

Honored to receive the 2026 Pew Biomedical Scholar

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05/13/2026

Congrats Lara Santos on McKnight Foundation Pecot award

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03/17/2026

Latest work led by Mikiko Nagashima on zebrafish retinal regeneration is posted on bioRiv.

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01/15/2026

Grateful to the Research Preventing Blindness for the Career Development Award

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11/29/2025

Our recent work spearheaded by Mengling Yang is now on bioRxiv. We developed an AAV-based strategy to convert Muller glia into functional retinal neurons in both injury-induced and genetic retinal degeneration.

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04/11/2025

Welcome Dr. Ying Chen to our team as a postdoctoral fellow.

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04/02/2025

Our new manuscript led by Nguyet Le and Sherine Awad is now published in eLife . We showed that AAV-mediated Oct4 expression can induce Muller glia cell reprogramming into bipolar neurons in adult mouse retina.

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07/12/2024

Our new paper by Nguyet Le is now out in Science Advances. We have found a new way to efficiently reprogram retinal Muller glial cells into neurons, even in the absence of injury signal, by simultaneous inhibition of repressors.

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07/01/2024

Thank you to the McKnight Foundation for the Neurobiology of Brain Disorders Award

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12/20/2023

Our paper on neuron regeneration in zebrafish retinas is out on Nature communications. We showed that:
(1) different injury/damage models result in different regenerative outcomes with biased regeneration of lost neurons
(2) regeneration process largely recapitulates retinal development

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12/16/2023

Welcome Dr. Sherine Awad to our team as a postdoctoral fellow.

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06/07/2023

Our paper on re-examining the role of Ptbp1 in reprograming astrocytes into neurons is out on Nature , Matters Arising. We showed that Ptbp1 deletion had little effect on astrocytes, and certainly did not reprogram astrocytes into neurons, in sharp contrast to previous claims. Our study calls for more stringent controls and criteria when studying cell fate conversion/reprograming.

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06/05/2023

Welcome Dr. Duc Vu to our team. We are glad to have you here. Dr. Vu obtained his PhD from Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan. His postdoc research will focus on:
(1) cell fate engineering
(2) identification of neuronal circuits controlling different behaviors