Affiliation: The Rockefeller University

Dr. Chiwei (Charles) Xu is a postdoctoral fellow at laboratory of Mammalian Cell Biology and Development, The Rockefeller University. His research primarily focuses on stem cell (SC) biology, tissue homeostasis, and inter-tissue communication. Dr. Xu obtained his bachelor’s degree in biological sciences from Fudan University, and he then received his PhD in developmental and regenerative biology in the laboratory of Norbert Perrimon at from Harvard University. His PhD thesis work , focused on the regulation of intestinal stem cell (ISC) activity in the model system of Drosophila midgut. He performed an RNAi screen to knockdown each putative receptor/transporter-encoding gene in the adult ISCs and identified several new mechanisms of how ISCs sense their microenvironment. His findings provide critical insights for understanding tissue maintenance, wound repair, and tumorigenesis.

In 2019, Dr. Xu joined Professor Elaine Fuchs' lab to explore how SCs sense and respond to more complex and diverse microenvironments in the mouse skin. The mammalian skin is not only a prime system to study epithelial stem cells, but also the largest sensory organ innervated by the peripheral nervous system (PNS). An emerging number of studies highlight the spatial and functional association between skin SCs and the PNS. Dr. Xu will take advantage of cutting-edge techniques including whole-mount clearing, single-cell RNA-seq, proteomic labeling, and lentiviral delivery to explore mechanisms underlying the crosstalk skin SCs and the PNS during wound repair and tumorigenesis.