Rong Fan, PhD, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering and a member of Yale Cancer Center's Signal Transduction Research Program, 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.