Wang’s studies are fueled by interest in cells

Greg Wang is fascinated by the molecular biology of cells and the many levels of modifications they encompass to regulate gene expression.

“Follow your heart and do what interests you the most,” he said.

Greg Wang

Wang followed his heart from China, where he earned undergraduate and master’s degrees, to the University of California, San Diego, where he pursued basic research to understand how the cell works. During his Ph.D. in biomedical sciences, he showed that nuclear receptor binding SET domain 1, a family histone methylase transferase protein, is directly linked to transcriptional regulation of the Hox-A locus and histone modification dysregulation leading to cancer formation.

Now an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Wang studies a number of chromatin-modulating enzyme machineries and histone reader proteins that have been shown to be critical for chromatin/gene regulation and often altered in disease states. He also studies phase separation of transcription factors, which is critically involved in pathogenesis. For these works, he has been named the winner of the 2022 American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology’s ASBMB Young Investigator Award.

“Whenever you pick a question to work on, the more fundamental and broader the question is, the more you will learn in the process of answering it,” Wang advises early-career scientists. The energy and curiosity of his students and postdocs fuel his fascination for chromatin biology, he said, and those lab members are leading his foray into molecular medicine.

The ASBMB award adds to a growing list of accolades including the Yang Family Biomedical Scholar award and the Phillip and Ruth Hettleman Prize, both from UNC in 2019; the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society Scholar award in 2018; and the American Cancer Society Research Scholar award in 2016.