Gregory Laboratory | Meet The Team

Post-Doctoral Fellows 

Mehdi Pirouz, PhD
mehdi.pirouz@childrens.harvard.edu

Mehdi received his PhD from Goettingen University, Germany (Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry) in 2013, during which he studied germ cell development and pluripotency in mouse embryonic stem cells. He also worked on the role of BAF chromatin remodeling complexes in brain development. Mehdi started his postdoctoral training in March 2014 in the Gregory lab and he is interested in the role of noncoding RNAs in stem cells, development and diseases.

Qi Liu, PhD 
qi.liu2@childrens.harvard.edu

Qi received his PhD degree in 2017 from Chinese Academy of Forestry, Beijing, China and afterwards joined the Gregory lab. He is currently working on RNA bioinformatics, as well as studying RNA post-transcriptional regulation using computational methods.

Esteban Orellana, PhD
esteban.orellana@childrens.harvard.edu

Esteban joined the Gregory laboratory in May 2018. He completed his graduate studies at Purdue University.  His project involved ligand-mediated miRNA delivery and miRNA combinatorial therapeutics for cancer. Esteban's current research focuses on RNA methylation and its role in gene regulation and cancers including glioblastoma and sarcomas.

Jia Cui, PhD
jia.cui@childrens.harvard.edu

Jia received her PhD in 2018 from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where she studied the post-transcriptional regulation of anti-apoptotic protein MCL1 in cancer. In August 2018 she joined the Gregory lab as a postdoctoral fellow and has been interested in the field of RNA biology. Jia's current research focuses on RNA modifications and their roles in gene regulation and cancer.

Jiazhi Li, PhD 
jiazhi.li@childrens.harvard.edu

Jiazhi received her PhD in 2018 from Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Her doctoral program focused on the structural and mechanistic basis of the CRISPR-Cas system. She joined the Gregory Lab in April 2019 and started her research on investigating mechanisms of posttranscriptional gene regulation using a structural and functional combining method.

Xin Yang, PhD 
xin.yang@childrens.harvard.edu

Xin received his PhD in 2018 from Beijing Institute of Genomics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He studied the topology of mRNA m5C methylomes and the essential roles of m5C in mRNA export regulation. Xin also studied m6A and its role in the dynamic regulation of co-transcriptional R-loop formation and transcription termination. Xin joined the Gregory Lab in September 2019 and started his research on RNA modifications and their roles in gene regulation and cancer.

Xushen Xiong, PhD 
xushen.xiong@childrens.harvard.edu

Xushen obtained his PhD degree in 2019 from Peking University in China where he received training in chemical biology, specifically in the epitranscriptomics field. He then joined the Gregory lab as a postdoc, co-supervised by Professor Manolis Kellis at MIT. Xushen is currently working on understanding the regulatory networks of RNA modification in diseases, by employing both computational and experimental approaches.

Graduate Student

Josef Saltz
josef.saltz@childrens.harvard.edu

Josef joined the Gregory lab as a PhD student of UMass Boston in October 2019. With a history of work as a Research Associate at RNA companies such as Moderna Therapeutics and Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, he's come back to the RNA world to investigate different modifications on RNA nucleosides and their effects in cancer.