Zheng Hu Receives IGI Postdoctoral Fellowship Award

The Innovative Genomics Initiative (IGI) is pleased to announce that Dr. Zheng Hu of Stanford University has been named the recipient of the first IGI Postdoctoral Fellowship Award. Dr. Hu will carry out the IGI Fellowship in his current position as a postdoctoral researcher in Christina Curtis’ lab at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

The IGI Postdoctoral Fellowship Award was established to provide financial support to a promising new Bay Area postdoctoral researcher to pursue novel research that employs next-generation tools to investigate genome editing, transcriptional regulation, epigenetic or DNA repair.

Dr. Hu’s IGI Fellowship project will integrate two diverse fields – population genetics and cancer genomics – in an attempt to elucidate the evolutionary principles underlying the genome evolution of cancer cells during cancer progression, metastasis, and drug resistance. This research will help scientists and medical professionals understand how and why cancer evolves so quickly, and by understanding the role of cell mutation rates in the spread of cancer, Dr. Hu hopes to develop models that will lead to viable cancer treatments.