Background
Dr. Danfeng Cai is interested in how physical and chemical signals dictate cellular functions. She obtained her B.S. from Peking University, and later her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine under the mentorship of Dr. Denise Montell, where she used live-cell imaging to study how mechanical force regulates directional migration of cell clusters [1, 2]. Her Ph.D. work was awarded the Bae Gyo Jung Award by Johns Hopkins University. In 2014, she became a Damon Runyon cancer research fellow with Dr. Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz at National Institutes of Health. She later moved to Howard Hughes Medical Institute -Janelia Research Campus to study how chromatin organization and transcription can be influenced by biomoleuclar condensates, jointly mentored by Drs. Zhe Liu and Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz. Dr. Cai will establish her lab at BMB Department of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and will use advanced imaging techniques to study how cells remodel their regulatory DNA landscape to turn on transcription [3].