Jun Wu PhD

Jun Wu obtained his bachelor's degree in Clinical Medicine from Shandong University School of Medicine, China. He earned his Ph.D. degree in Life Science from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, focusing on centrosome cycle regulation. Dr. Wu received his postdoctoral training at the University of Southern California with Dr. Martin Pera and the Salk Institute with Dr. Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte. His postdoctoral work focused on stem cell biology and genome editing. In January 2018, Dr. Wu joined UT Southwestern as an assistant professor in the Department of Molecular Biology.

Dr. Wu’s work has contributed to the generation of new stem cells for basic and translational studies, and developing novel and efficient genome and epigenome editing tools. He expanded the spectrum of pluripotent states by capturing several new types of pluripotent stem cells (PSCs) with distinct molecular and phenotypic features from different species. He has also generated PSC-derived interspecies chimeras and developed an efficient and versatile interspecies blastocyst complementation system for the generation of organs and tissues from one species inside another species. His group is particularly interested in harnessing interspecies chimeras for studying developmental biology in an evolutionary context, body- and organ-size determination, species’ specific behavioral traits, cancer resistance, and molecular basis of species barriers. Most recently, Dr. Wu's group has developed strategies to generate stem cell embryo models for studying peri-implantation development in vitro.