The UNC Department of Genetics is delighted to announce the appointment of Jie Xu, PhD, to the UNC faculty. Dr. Xu joins us as an assistant professor in the Department of Genetics at the UNC School of Medicine and a member of UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Dr. Xu comes to UNC from the University of California San Diego, where she was a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Bing Ren’s laboratory. She previously trained at Northwestern University and earned her PhD in Biomedical Sciences from Penn State University.
Dr. Xu will lead an emerging program in cancer genomics and epigenomics. Her research explores the regulatory consequences of cancer genomic structural variations, alterations in the epigenomic landscape and 3D chromatin architecture, and the development of single-cell technologies. She has pioneered Paired-TF, a single-cell method enabling simultaneous profiling of transcription factor binding and RNA expression, and has applied this technology to study molecular aging in the brain. Her work also includes mapping transcription factor networks across cell states and dissecting the roles of structural proteins such as Cohesin and CTCF in neurodifferentiation.
Dr. Xu’s contributions have advanced understanding of enhancer hijacking and chromatin structural alterations in acute myeloid leukemia, as highlighted in her landmark publication in Nature (2022). She has co-developed computational frameworks such as NeoLoopFinder for detecting chromatin interactions induced by structural variants, and her research has appeared in Nature Genetics, Nature Methods, Nature Cell Biology, and Nature Biotechnology.
Her achievements have been recognized with numerous honors, including the Dean’s Graduation Award and Charles W. Hill Graduate Student Award at Penn State, multiple travel and poster awards, and full scholarships for advanced training programs. She has delivered invited oral presentations at major conferences such as the 4D Nucleome Annual Meeting and the American Society of Human Genetics.