Overview
Chun Han is a Nancy M. and Samuel C. Fleming Assistant Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics and the Weill Institute for Cell and Molecular Biology. He is a member of the Graduate Fields of Biochemistry, Molecular and Cell Biology (BMCB), Genetics, Genomics and Development (GG&D), and Neurobiology and Behavior (NB&B). After obtaining a B.S. degree in Cell Biology and Genetics in Peking University, China, he went to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital for his Ph.D, where he worked with Xinhua Lin to study morphogen gradient formation in Drosophila. He then joined the lab of Yuh Nung Jan at the University of California, San Francisco, as a Jane Coffin Childs postdoctoral fellow. He started his faculty position at Cornell in November, 2013.
Research Focus
Fundamental to its ability in forming neural circuits and processing information, each of the billions of neurons in the brain needs to establish and maintain a functional dendritic structure. The research in the Han lab is focused on deciphering the secret of dendrite development and dendrite degeneration. By using cutting edge technologies in molecular biology, cell biology, microscopy, and genetics, we wish to uncover core principles of dendrite morphogenesis at molecular and cellular levels both during normal development and in neuronal degeneration.