New Faculty Profiles
Welcome...
Lok-Yin Roy Wong, PhD
Chun-Chieh (Jack) Hsu, PhD
Dr.
Wong received his PhD at the University of Hong Kong where he studied
the role of coronavirus proteins in perturbing innate immune responses.
He then moved to Iowa and joined Dr. Stanley Perlman's lab for his
postdoctoral training and research on coronavirus pathogenesis. During
his postdoctoral training, Dr. Wong studied and characterized the Spike
mutations found in human and camel MERS-CoV isolates in relation to
pathogenesis. At the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Wong was
involved in developing several mouse models for SARS-CoV-2 infection
that have been widely used by the scientific community. He also
isolated a mouse-adapted strain of SARS-CoV-2 that causes severe
disease in mice as a pathogenic model for COVID-19 for studying
SARS-CoV-2 pathogenesis and vaccine and antiviral development.
Dr.
Wong joined the Center for Virus-Host-Innate Immunity (CVHII) at
Rutgers NJMS as an Assistant Professor and Chancellor Scholar in the Department of
Microbiology, Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics in the Fall of
2023. The Wong lab's research focus on coronavirus pathogenesis will be
addressed by understanding 1) CoV protein functions in relation to
pathogenesis; 2) Immunopathogenesis caused by CoV infection;
3) Development of animal models for studying CoV pathogenesis. The lab
uses various virology and immunology approaches to investigate virus-
and immune (host)-mediated pathogenesis in various model systems.
Dr. Hsu received his BS and MS from
National Taiwan University. He attended Duke University for his Ph.D.,
where he worked in Christopher Nicchitta’s laboratory to discover and
characterize translational regulation and RNA localization in eukaryotic
cells. His postdoctoral research was at Yale University in Peter
Cresswell’s laboratory, where he sought to apply his molecular biology
training to investigate virus-host interactions in viral infection and in the innate antiviral response.
Dr. Hsu joined the Center for Virus-Host-Innate Immunity (CVHII) at
Rutgers-NJMS as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine
in the Fall of 2023. His research focuses on the functions and
regulations of RNA translation and RNA modifications in health and
disease. The Hsu lab primarily focuses on understanding the molecular
arms race between virus and host in two major research directions: 1) how viruses subvert host translation to hijack the host translation machinery for viral protein production, and 2) how type I interferon induces an antiviral state in host cells to restrict viral replication.
The overarching goal of the Hsu lab is to contribute to a greater
understanding of how virus-host interactions enhance or prevent
diseases.
