Xiaohua is a Professor and a Cheung Kong Scholar in the School of Medicine at Tsinghua University. Her major research is to understand how the non-coding portions of the genome influence chromatin structure, gene expression, and stem-cell fate in development. In the past years, the Shen lab has rigorously investigated fundamental aspects of ncRNAs, genomic repeats, and RNA-binding proteins in the regulation of transcription and chromatin. Her work facilitates the functional inference of ncRNA genes, and brings about a paradigm-shifted understanding of genomic repeats and their associated transcripts in organizing the genome and the higher-order chromatin structure.
