Howard Chang

Howard Y. Chang, MD, PhD, Virginia and D.K. Ludwig Professor of Cancer Research, Professor, Departments of Genetics and Dermatology, Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Director NIH/NHGRI Center for Genomic Excellence, Stanford University School of Medicine 

Research Description: Dr. Chang’s research has focused on mechanisms that coordinate the activities of large number of genes in cell fate control. He has made a series of seminal discoveries that introduced the important and pervasive roles of long noncoding RNAs in biological regulation. His group has substantial experience in epigenetics and RNA biology, including invention of new methods for epigenomic profiling, mapping RNA occupancy on chromatin, and defining RNA structures genome-wide. Chang’s group pioneered methods to identify key regulators of large-scale transcriptional programs; these methods have been highly fruitful for studies of diabetes, cancer and aging by Stanford investigators, and rapidly adopted by the community of science focused on diabetes research or other research worldwide. Dr. Chang was previously an investigator on a U01 of the NIH Beta-Cell Biology Consortium (BCBC). He is a tireless, cheerful collaborator of many investigators in SDRC. Dr. Chang also leads the NHGRI Center of Excellence in Genomic Science at Stanford.

Selected relevant publications (Stanford DRC Members in BOLD):

  1. Paik DT, Cho S, Tian L, Chang HY, Wu JC. Single-cell RNA sequencing in cardiovascular development, disease and medicine. Nat Rev Cardiol. 2020 Aug;17(8):457-473. doi: 10.1038/s41569-020-0359-y. PMID: 32231331; PMCID: PMC7528042. 

  2. Sun L, Fazal FM, Li P, Broughton JP, Lee B, Tang L, Huang W, Kool ET, Chang HY, Zhang QC. RNA structure maps across mammalian cellular compartments. Nat Struct Mol Biol. 2019 Apr;26(4):322-330. doi: 10.1038/s41594-019-0200-7. PMID: 30886404; PMCID: PMC6640855. 

  3. Arda HE, Tsai J, Rosli YR, Giresi P, Bottino R, Greenleaf WJ, Chang HY, Kim SK. A Chromatin Basis for Cell Lineage and Disease Risk in the Human Pancreas. Cell Syst. 2018 Sep 26;7(3):310-322.e4. doi: 10.1016/j.cels.2018.07.007. PMID: 30145115; PMCID: PMC6347013. 

  4. Satpathy AT, Saligrama N, Buenrostro JD, Wei Y, Wu B, Rubin AJ, Granja JM, Lareau CA, Li R, Qi Y, Parker KR, Mumbach MR, Serratelli WS, Gennert DG, Schep AN, Corces MR, Khodadoust MS, Kim YH, Khavari PA, Greenleaf WJ, Davis MM, Chang HY. Transcript-indexed ATAC-seq for precision immune profiling. Nat Med. 2018 May;24(5):580-590. doi: 10.1038/s41591-018-0008-8. PMID: 29686426; PMCID: PMC5948148.