Rong Fan Wins 2012 Packard Fellowship

Rong Fan, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering, has been awarded a 2012 Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering.

Awarded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Fellowships were established in 1988 “to allow the nation’s most promising professors to pursue science and engineering research early in their careers.” A total of 100 nominations are invited from the presidents of 50 select universities each year; 16 early-career Fellows are ultimately selected to receive individual grants of $875,000, to be distributed over a five-year period. The Packard Fellowships are among the most prestigious awards given to the nation’s early career scientist and engineers.

Fan was awarded the Packard Fellowship for his proposal to study genome-scale epigenetic mapping of single cells. Epigenetic changes are changes in genomic DNA methylation states or chromatin modification that control the expression of a host of genes without alterations to the DNA sequence. They play an important role in the study of disease, including in many cancers. Current technologies, however, don’t allow for single-cell epigenetic analysis at the genome level.

Fan proposes to develop a microfluidic processor for single cell epigenomic analysis, applying it to study intratumor heterogeneity and tumor evolution with the ultimate goal of creating a high-throughput microfluidic chip for genome-scale epigenetic mapping of single tumor cells from patients.

This is a new project that is of high risk, yet potentially highly rewarding.

“The Packard Fellowship will allow me to take my expertise in single cell analysis to explore a new area – epigenetics – and also foster collaboration with experts in biology such as Sherman Weissman, Sterling Professor at Yale School of Medicine,” says Fan. “The proposed technology can open up tremendous opportunities to understand gene regulatory mechanisms in a variety of biological systems including stem cell differentiation, cellular immunity and neuronal development.”

Past Packard Fellowship winners from Yale SEAS include Hong Tang (Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering & Physics ) and Charles Ahn (Professor of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science, Applied Physics & Physics).