Jack Peter Green, MD, PhD (1925-2007), founding Chair of the Department of Pharmacology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, elevated the Department to international prominence during his leadership (1968-1999). A pioneer in pharmacology, he established histamine’s role as a central nervous system neurotransmitter and neuromodulator and advanced the use of quantum mechanical methods in drug action research. His achievements earned him the highest honor of the European Histamine Research Society.


Dr. Chuan He
John T. Wilson Distinguished Service Professor
Department of Chemistry
Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
The University of Chicago
Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Dr. Chuan He is the John T. Wilson Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Chicago. He received his bachelor of science degree in 1994 from the University of Science and Technology of China and his Ph.D. in chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2000. After training as a Damon-Runyon postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, he joined the University of Chicago as an assistant professor, rising to associate professor in 2008 and full professor in 2010. He was selected as an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 2013. Dr. He’s research spans a broad range of fields including chemical biology, RNA biology, epigenetics, biochemistry, and genomics. His recent research concerns reversible RNA and DNA methylation in biological regulation. In 2011, his group discovered reversible RNA methylation as a new mechanism of gene expression regulation. His laboratory characterized several key reader proteins that bind preferentially to m6A-modified RNA and regulate their stability and translation. In 2020, Dr. He’s laboratory reported prevalent m6A methylation on chromatin-associated regulatory RNAs (carRNAs), which regulates chromatin state and global transcription. He is the winner of the 2017 Paul Marks Prize in Cancer Research, 2023 Wolf Prize in Chemistry, and 2023 Falling Walls Science Breakthrough of the Year, Life Sciences.

Lecture Title
“Chromatin Regulation by RNA Methylation and Small RNAs”