Biosketch

2025 - La Caixa Junior Leader Fellow
2025 - Group Leader at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG), Barcelona (Spain)
2021 - Postdoc at ETH Zürich, D-BSSE, Basel (Switzerland)
2020 - HFSP Postdoctoral Fellow 
2020 - EMBO Postdoctoral Fellow
2019 - Postdoc at Institute of Molecular and Clinical Ophthalmology Basel (IOB), Basel (Switzerland)
2019 - PhD in Genome and Systems BIology, National Taiwan University and Academia Sinica, Taipei (Taiwan)
2011 - BSc in Life Science, National Taiwan University, Taipei (Taiwan)
 

Summary

Our group uses stem cell-derived models, single-cell technologies, and perturbation screening to uncover the regulatory logic that governs cell fate decisions and leverage this knowledge to engineer human cells. 

Human cells engineered in vitro have revolutionized our ability to model human biology and diseases, offering exciting opportunities for therapeutic screening and intervention. In parallel, the advancements in single-cell genomics allow us to analyze cell identity and quantify gene regulation at an unprecedented resolution. Coupling perturbation screening with high-throughput single-cell sequencing, we have accelerated the process of cell fate engineering and expanded the landscape of human neuronal cell diversity achievable in vitro, as demonstrated in our previous studies (Lin, Janssens et al., bioRxiv 2023; Azbukina, He, Lin et al., bioRxiv, 2025).

In the coming years, we will continue our efforts on stem cell-derived 2D and 3D neural models to engineer neuron subtypes, multicellular niches, and maturation. Beyond neural lineages, we are broadly interested in engineering human cell diversity and investigating the design principle that governs cell identity changes. We are also interested in studying and learning from other cell fate and state transition events, such as development, reprogramming, regeneration, and cancer. We believe that in vitro recapitulation is the key to achieve a thorough understanding of cell identity changes and to really precisely engineer cell fates and states, and that single-cell perturbation screening on stem cell models is the core to such innovation to drive discovery and design in human biology.