Dr. Lei Xiao, Professor, College of Animals, Zhejiang University.

Education and Training:
September 1991-July 1995: Department of Biology, Wuhan University, China, Bachelor of Science.
September 1997-July 2000: Shanghai Institute of Cell Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Ph.D. candidate.
September 2000-July 2003: Department of Molecular Biology, Adolf Butenandt Institute, Munich University, Germany. Ph.D. candidate. Ph. D.
October 2003-Sept, 2005: The Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins, Department of Cancer Biology, School of Medicine, John Hopkins University. Postdoctor fellow.

Research Interest:
1. iPS cell technology.
Human iPS cells should be useful for studying the mechanisms of somatic cell reprogramming, the generation of patient-specific stem cell lines for studying various disease mechanisms and eventual transplantation therapies. They are focusing to improve the technology to eliminate the genomic integration of the virus vector.
2. Human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) self-renew indefinitely while maintaining pluripotency. The molecular mechanism underlying hESCs self-renewal and pluripotency is poorly understood. Dr. Xiao's lab is planning to analyze the function of different signal pathways in maintaining the stemness of human embryonic stem cells. The signal pathways they are going to check include Wnt, BMP, FGF, TGF-β, et al.. They expect that our study will provide more information about how the stemness is maintained in human ES cells.
3. Differentiate human embryonic stem cells into desired tissue cells. Methods should be established to differentiate human ES cells into specific lineages for transplantation therapy in the future, e.g. hematopoietic stem cells, insulin secreted pancreas beta cells, liver cells, et. al.. Their lab is planning to establish the differentiation protocol which will facilitate the study of human embryonic stem cells.