Jian Xu received his Ph.D. with Dr. Stephen Smale from UCLA, where he studied epigenetic regulation of stem cell pluripotency. Upon completion of his Ph.D. training in 2008, he earned a Helen Hay Whitney Foundation postdoctoral fellowship and joined Dr. Stuart Orkin’s laboratory at Boston Children’s Hospital, Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

In 2012, he became an instructor in pediatric hematology-oncology at Harvard Medical School. With Dr. Orkin, he made important discoveries toward understanding the clinically relevant fetal-to-adult developmental globin switch and the epigenetic control of blood stem cell development.

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Jian Xu received his Ph.D. with Dr. Stephen Smale from UCLA, where he studied epigenetic regulation of stem cell pluripotency. Upon completion of his Ph.D. training in 2008, he earned a Helen Hay Whitney Foundation postdoctoral fellowship and joined Dr. Stuart Orkin’s laboratory at Boston Children’s Hospital, Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

In 2012, he became an instructor in pediatric hematology-oncology at Harvard Medical School. With Dr. Orkin, he made important discoveries toward understanding the clinically relevant fetal-to-adult developmental globin switch and the epigenetic control of blood stem cell development.

In 2014, Dr. Xu received a first-time investigator award from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas and joined the faculty of the Children’s Medical Center Research Institute at UT Southwestern Medical Center as an Assistant Professor in Pediatrics. His research focuses on blood cell development and how abnormalities can cause cancers such as childhood leukemia. He seeks to advance our understanding of the basic principles of gene regulation in normal and neoplastic blood cell development, and provide critical insights into developing novel therapeutic approaches for target-based cancer interventions.

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