Chuan He

Chuan He is the John T. Wilson Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Chicago. He was born in February 1972. He received his Bachelor of Science degree in 1994 from the University of Science and Technology of China and his Ph.D. in chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2000, studying under Professor Stephen J. Lippard. After training as a Damon-Runyon postdoctoral fellow with Professor Gregory L. Verdine at Harvard University, he joined the University of Chicago as an Assistant Professor, rising to Associate Professor in 2008 and Full Professor in 2010. He was the Director of the Institute for Biophysical Dynamics at the University of Chicago from 2012-2017, and the inaugurate Director of the Synthetic and Functional Biomolecules Center (SFBC) at Peking University from 2011 to 2020. He was selected as an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 2013. Professor He is the current Editor-In-Chief for ACS Chemical Biology.

Dr. He’s research spans a broad range of fields including chemical biology, RNA biology, epigenetics, biochemistry, and genomics. His recent research concerns reversible RNA and DNA methylation in biological regulation. In 2011, his group discovered reversible RNA methylation as a new mechanism of gene expression regulation. His laboratory characterized the RNA m⁶A methyltransferase complex and several key reader proteins that bind preferentially to m⁶A-modified RNA and regulate their stability and translation. In 2020, Dr. He’s laboratory reported prevalent m⁶A methylation on chromatin-associated regulatory RNAs (carRNAs), which regulates chromatin state and global transcription. The reversible methylation of carRNA controls mammalian and plant development. His laboratory also spearheaded the development of enabling chemical biology technologies to study RNA and DNA modifications as well as gene expression regulation.