Background
Xiao Peng is currently Assistant Professor of Genetic Medicine and Director of the Inborn Errors of Immunity clinic at Hopkins, where she completed a combined residency in Pediatrics and Medical Genetics, followed by a year as T32-supported Research Fellow and Chief Resident in Genetics.
Xiao graduated in 2005 with a B.S. in Chemistry with Honors from Caltech and then worked for 2 years as an HHMI-sponsored research assistant in the Cancer Genomics program at the Broad Institute of Harvard/MIT. During this time, she participated in many published basic science and translational medicine projects, spanning the range from DNA replication to transcriptomics to the role of tyrosine kinases in cancer therapy to the understanding of miRNA function in hematopoietic development. Here, she was also first exposed to the magic of genomics, witnessing first-hand the advent of massively parallel sequencing technologies.
She graduated with an MD-PhD from Weill Cornell/Rockefeller/Memorial Sloan-Kettering Tri-Institutional MD-PhD Program in 2017, where she continued to pursue her interest in fundamental biological processes by studying the interface between DNA replication/repair, transcriptional regulation and post-translational protein modification pathways. She also published additional research in the realms of immunology and developmental gene regulation.
Since being at Hopkins, she has adapted her basic science background to an understanding of human disease. Her abiding interests in genome maintenance, gene regulation and host-pathogen evolution have synergistically converged with her passion for the care of patients with disorders of immunity and hematopoiesis.
Xiao continues to spearhead the effort to bring more patients with suspected inborn errors of immunity (IEIs) to molecular diagnosis, co-authoring multiple book chapters, several key reviews and papers in the process. She is very excited to work with so many great colleagues as a founding member of the Center for Immune-Related Disorders - to help build better protocols, resources and infrastructure for diagnosis and management of IEI patients, while carving out new paths in diagnosis and treatment on the research side.
She is equally passionate about the need to dedicate time to teaching, mentoring, and outreach. She has taught and continues to teach courses on immunology, genetics/genomics and their interface to PhD and MD students, as well as to residents and fellows across many departments. She acts as the clinical liaison between the Johns Hopkins Genomics lab and hospital providers in need of molecular diagnostic testing.
Finally, Xiao feels very lucky to be a citizen of the world and to have had seminal clinical experiences with the Indian Health Service and abroad. She remains a member of the research genetics team at the University of Freiburg's Center for Chronic Immunodeficiency and collaborates with many excellent researchers and clinicians around the world. And she is always happy to talk about wine with anyone interested...