Bio

Juntao is a Ph.D. candidate in the Biological and Biomedical Sciences (BBS) program at Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and Harvard Medical School (HMS). Before graduate school, he did his undergraduate study at University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) and received a B.S in Biology with honorary rank in 2017. During his senior undergraduate year, he worked with Dr. Bing Ren at University of California San Diego to map the enhancer landscape of POU5F1 in human embryonic stem cells using genome editing coupled with high-throughput sequencing (CREST-Seq, Diao et al., Nat. Methods, 2017). His undergraduate thesis was recognized as an outstanding undergraduate thesis of Class of 2017. 

Juntao joined BBS program in 2017. His Ph.D. thesis advisor is Dr. Danesh Moazed at the Department of Cell Biology of HMS and Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). Moazed Lab studies the molecular mechanism of epigenetic inheritance using the silent chromatin domains, also known as heterochromatin, as model systems. Heterochromatin is a type of chromatin structure that is transcriptionally inactive and less accessible to RNA polymerases and mobile elements. Studies have indicated these heterochromatin structures can be inherited through mitosis and meiosis. This phenomenon, known as epigenetic inheritance, plays foundamental roles in maintaining gene expression programs, cellular memory and genome stability. Based on previous works from Moazed lab and others, it is known that the establishment and maintenance of the heterochromatin domains requires the cooperativity between the positive feedback loops via "read-write" mechanism as well as sequence sensors such as DNA or RNA working in cis. Moazed Lab and others also demonstrated that the positive feedback loop generated from histone modifications itself is not sufficient for epigenetic inheritance in wild type cells, which, in additions, requires DNA sequence or RNA interference. Juntao's research interest in Moazed Lab is to elucidate the molecular mechanism of epigenetic inheritance using the heterochromatin model in S. pombe

Juntao is a member of Molecular Mechanistic Biology (MMB) Program at Harvard Medical School.

Outside of lab work, Juntao is interested in music, food, and traveling. Juntao is a big fan of classical and indie music. He has been practicing the piano since seven. His favorite composers include Prokofiev, Bach, Chopin, Shostakovich, Bartok, Ravel and many others.