Dr. Bo Xia is a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. He is also Gene Regulation Observatory (GRO) Fellow and a Principal Investigator at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Xia and his laboratory aims to understand the principles and mechanisms of genome organization, and their dynamic regulation underlying development, disease, and evolution.
Dr. Xia develops and applies state-of-the-art genomics technologies – both experimental and computational – to accelerate discoveries in genome sciences. Xia’s career started as an independent research associate in Dr. Chengqi Yi’s lab at Peking University, leading the development of chemical technologies for epigenomic analyses (Xia et al, 2015; Zhu et al, 2017). Xia conducted his Ph.D. research at NYU School of Medicine, co-mentored by Drs. Itai Yanai and Jef D. Boeke. Xia pioneered a few innovative studies on genome regulation and its impact on human development and evolution, including revealing the genetic basis of tail-loss evolution in humans and apes (Xia et al, 2024); proposing the transcriptional scanning model for modulating genome evolution (Xia et al, 2020); proposing the hypothesis of periodic table of cell types (Xia and Yanai, 2019); and most recently, developing a deep learning-enabled high-throughput approach for investigating 3D genome organization (Tan et al, 2023).
Dr. Xia is recipient of multiple prestigious awards, among which include the 2020 Regeneron Prize for Creative Innovation, the Harold M. Weintraub Graduate Student Award (2022), and the NIH Director's Early Independent Award (2022). Dr. Xia started his independent laboratory in the Gene Regulation Observatory at the Broad Institute in September, 2022. The Xia laboratory develops high-throughput approaches to discover functional DNA elements and novel genome regulators. Their long-term goal is to understand the principles and mechanisms of genome regulation, how they evolve across the tree of life, and how they go awry in diseases.
Read more: Xia Laboratory