Chun Han

Chun Han is an Assistant Professor in the Weill Institute for Cell and Molecular Biology and Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics, Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He received his Bachelor of Science degree from Peking University, China, and a Ph.D. from University of Cincinnati, USA.

Dr. Han developed a great interest in studying cell biological questions using microscopy in genetically tractable model systems during his graduate and postdoctoral training. As a graduate student in Xinhua Lin’s lab at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, he studied how morphogens form extracellular concentration gradients using Drosophila embryos and wing discs as model systems. Attracted by the beauty of Drosophila somatosensory neurons, he then moved to Yuh-Nung Jan’s lab at University of California, San Francisco to study dendrite biology. There he developed new tools to study interactions between sensory dendrites and nearby non-neural cells including glia and epidermal cells.

Dr. Han established his independent lab at Cornell University in 2014. His research interests are on extrinsic regulation of dendrite morphogenesis, the roles of neuron-phagocyte interactions in neurodegeneration, and development of cutting-edge genetic and imaging tools in Drosophila.