Wei Feng

My research interest is to uncover the gene expression regulatory mechanisms at the transcriptional and translational level during cardiovascular disease as a means to understand disease pathology. I received my graduate training focusing on dilated heart failure syndrome induced by hyperglycemia. I have been trained in the area of cardiovascular disease for more than 5 years and I am familiar with the mouse models of cardiac hypertrophy, heart failure and congenital heart disease (CHD), as well as the technology of stem cell differentiation and reprogramming.

I'm now using state of the art single-cell mRNA sequencing approaches to understand the cellular heterogeneity in the human heart during development. I will analyze the cardiomyocyte subtype and maturation stages in different differentiation conditions using human iPSCs. The gene expression profile from single cells will precisely map the cell population changes in CHD when compared to normal development. This will reveal the pathogenesis of CHDs and lay a solid foundation for the mechanism of heart defects. To accomplish these goals, I will use newly designed statistical methods to better analyzing the single-cell sequencing data acquired with a focus on genes involved in cell-cell signaling and cellular metabolism.