Cancer Center at Illinois (CCIL) member Jun Song, Founder Professor in Physics
Cancer Center at Illinois (CCIL) member Jun Song received a $319,585 award in January as part of his multi-year R01 grant from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) for his project “Predicting Transcriptional and Epigenetic Networks in Cancer from Sequencing Data.” The R01 research grant program, sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the NCI, provides principal investigators with support for health-related research and development consistent with the NIH’s mission.
As an interdisciplinary cancer researcher, Song applies mathematics, physics, and computation expertise to biomedical research. Song’s research uses integrative genomics to study the interplay among transcription factors, chromatin structure, non-coding RNAs, and gene regulation in the development of diseases. The Song lab studies how epigenetic and transcriptional changes are associated with cellular differentiation and cancer progression by reconstructing molecular interaction networks from high-throughput genomic data to identify actionable targets for improving regenerative medicine and precision cancer therapy.
Song is a Founder Professor in the Department of Physics, Director of the Fisk-UIUC Training of Under-represented Minds in Data Science and Quantitative Biology (FUTURE-MINDS-QB), and an affiliate of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology (IGB). Song is also affiliated with the NIH Center of Excellence in Big Data Computing and the NSF Physics Frontiers Center.