Our Team

Rongxin Fang (Principal investigator)

Rongxin is an Assistant Professor at Stanford University in the Departments of Neurosurgery and Genetics (by courtesy) and a member of the Wu Tsai Neuroscience Institute.

Rongxin received his Ph.D. in Bioinformatics and Systems Biology at UC San Diego, where he was advised by Bing Ren (2015-2019). During this time, he developed high-throughput genomic technologies and computational tools to map the structure and activity of the mammalian genome at a large scale with single-cell resolution. He then applied these approaches to understand how cis-regulatory elements such as enhancers in the genome control gene expression and how this process can give rise to the distinct gene expression programs that underlie the cellular diversity in the mammalian brain.

As an HHMI-Damon Runyon Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Xiaowei Zhuang at Harvard University (2019-2024), he developed and applied genome-scale and volumetric 3D transcriptome imaging methods to map the molecular and cellular architecture of the mammalian brain during evolution and aging. He also participated in the collaboration with Adam Cohen and Catherine Dulac to combine transcriptome imaging with functional neuronal recording to identify neuronal populations in the animal brain that underlie specific bran functions.

He has received multiple fellowships and awards, including the Damon Runyon Postdoctoral Fellowship, Rising Star in Engineering in Health (Johns Hopkins & Columbia University), Next Generation Leaders (Allen Institute) and Damon Runyon-Dale F. Frey Award for Breakthrough Scientists.

His work has been supported by HHMI, Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation, 4D Nucleome, ENCODE Project, Roadmap Epigenome Consortia, and BRAIN Initiative.

Outside the lab, Rongxin enjoys long-distance running and biking.

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  • Emma Bi

    Research Assistant

    Emma recently graduated from UC Berkeley, where she double majored in Molecular and Cell Biology and Data Science. She is broadly interested in applying genomic technologies to study neuronal development and plasticity. Before joining the Fang Lab, Emma worked in Barbara Meyer’s lab, where she used genomic tools to identify key genes involved in sex determination in C. elegans, and in Yang Dan’s lab, she investigated how sleep deprivation affects neurotransmitter synthesis in mice catecholaminergic neurons. In the Fang Lab, Emma is developing sequencing- and imaging-based genomic tools to study, at single-molecule resolution, how transcription in the brain is altered by neural activity. Outside the lab, she is also passionate about scientific writing, check out some of her essays here.