Dr. Jin received his undergraduate education at Tsinghua University and Ph.D. from Cornell University Weill Medical School/Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. After completing his Postdoctoral training focusing on cancer biology at Rockefeller University, he joined the faculty of the Pharmacology Department at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, Rutgers University. Dr. Jin’s important contributions to sciences include: cloning Drosophila p53, defining the role of autophagy in tumor suppression, establishing the role of autophagy in white and brown adipose development, demonstrating the therapeutic strategy of mitochondrial uncoupling for type 2 diabetes, inventing safe mitochondrial uncouplers for therapeutic development for cancer and metabolic diseases, and inventing the Pin-point CRISPR base-editing platform technology.
The ongoing research projects in Dr. Jin’s laboratory are: developing therapeutic CRISPR base-editing agents for genetic diseases (Duchenne muscular disease, sickle cell anemia, beta-thalassemia) and cancer (CAR-T); developing new CRISPR gene editing tools, investigating mitochondrial bioenergetics in cancer and metabolic diseases, developing small-molecule mitochondrial modifying therapeutic agents for hepatic metastatic cancer of colorectal and pancreatic origins, acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL), type 2 diabetes, and non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH).