Research groups
Li-Hsin Chang
Postdoctoral Scientist
Dr. Li-Hsin Chang is a postdoctoral scientist at the MRC Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine (WIMM), University of Oxford, in the laboratory of Dr. James Davies. Her research focuses on 3D genome organization, transcription factor binding landscape, and CRISPR-mediated genome editing.
Li-Hsin obtained her BS in Pharmacy and MS in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the National Taiwan University. She then earned her PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she uncovered novel functions of the oldest members of the transcription factor family KRAB zinc finger proteins. Following this, she moved to Paris, France, to undertake her first postdoctoral position, focusing on 3D genome organization. During this time, she developed a novel Chromosome Conformation Capture (3C)-based method combined with Nanopore long-read sequencing, called Nano-C. This innovative technique enables the detection of multiple interactions among genomic loci, providing precise characterization of complex chromatin structures such as Topologically Associated Domain (TAD) boundaries.
Li-Hsin began her current postdoctoral research in 2022 at Oxford, where she has gained extensive experience in CRISPR-mediated genome editing. Her projects focus on addressing the challenges of off-target effects and unintended structural alterations associated with CRISPR-mediated editing. She is developing innovative methods that combine targeted enrichment techniques with long-read sequencing to characterize large insertions, deletions, and translocations at edited sites.
Additionally, she is working on creating a more efficient and comprehensive method to detect off-target effects globally, with the aim of scaling up off-target screening. This approach seeks to incorporate off-target detection at the very upstream stages of clinical guide RNA screening. By developing these new methods for investigating off-target effects and unintended consequences, her work contributes to identifying safe and precise editing strategies, which are crucial for advancing clinical genome editing.