Ya-chieh Hsu PhD

Dr. Hsu is an Associate Professor at Harvard University where she studies how growth and cell fate are controlled, and how different cell types coordinate with one another to maintain tissue function during development, regeneration, and repair. She uses a wide variety of approaches and techniques, including molecular, cellular, genetic, and genomic tools, to investigate how stem cell behaviors are regulated. Specifically, Dr. Hsu researches how to help adult skin to better regenerate when wounded, paving the way to improve treatments for challenging conditions like burns, injuries, and chronic wounds.

Dr. Hsu focused her research on the regulation of stem cell proliferation in the body: too little proliferation leads to defects in tissue maintenance, too much leads to tumor formation. By using hair follicle stem cells as a model, she discovered that the stem cell progeny were important regulators of their own stem cell parents, influencing the speed with which the parents proliferate. She is continuing this research in her independent research at Harvard in order to understand how to manipulate and maintain the optimal progeny activity in normal regeneration as well as in cancer formation. She completed her postdoctoral studies at Rockefeller in Dr. Elaine Fuchs's lab.