Bio
Dr Hongyan Wang is currently Professor and Acting Programme Director of the Neuroscience & Behavioral Disorders (NBD) Program at Duke-NUS Medical School, Singapore. In 1998 she received her B.S. from East China University of Science & Technology, China. In 2004 she received a PhD in Genetics with Prof. Mohan Balasubramanian from Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory, Singapore, with the Chua Toh Hua Memorial Gold Medal awarded for her PhD work in the cell division of the fission yeast. Subsequently, she joined Prof. William Chia’s laboratory in Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory as a postdoctoral Research Fellow working on asymmetric division of Drosophila neural stem cells from 2004 to 2007. She had one-year postdoctoral training stint at the University of California, San Francisco with Prof. Ulrike Heberlein from 2006 to 2007. She joined Duke-NUS Medical School as an Assistant Professor in October 2007. She was appointed to the faculty of the NUS Graduate School for Integrative Sciences and Engineering (NGS)/ Integrative Sciences and Engineering Programme (ISEP) since 2008 and was jointly appointed at the Department of Physiology, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine since 2009. She was appointed as Interim Director of Duke-NUS NBD program in 2015- February 2017 and as Deputy Director of Duke-NUS NBD since April 2017. She was promoted to Professor with tenure at Duke-NUS in Jan 2020.
Dr. Wang’s laboratory focuses on understanding neural stem cell asymmetric division, proliferation and differentiation in Drosophila. She was among the first few Drosophila researchers who established Drosophila neuroblasts as a new model for studying stem cell self-renewal and brain tumor formation. Currently, she is one of the leading scientists in the field of Drosophila neural stem cells. Her work is published in Nature, Nature Cell Biology, Nature Communications, Developmental Cell, PLOS Biology, eLife, Cell Reports, Journal of Cell Biology, etc. Her work has been recognized by experts in the field and she has been invited to major Drosophila conferences in the US, Europe, and Australia as a Keynote/ plenary speaker. Her work has also often been chosen for press releases by Duke-NUS, journals and other scientific media. For her ground-breaking research in Drosophila neural stem cells, Dr. Wang was awarded the Singapore National Academy of Sciences and A*STAR Young Scientist Award in the year 2008, which is the highest recognition for researchers in Singapore under the age of 35. In the year 2009, she was awarded as a National Research Foundation (NRF) fellow and awarded US$ 2 million funding to support her research program. She has demonstrated excellent capability to secure extramural funding, as she has secured a total amount of over S$ 12 million in extramural funding as a PI and mentor since 2007. She has served as an executive member of Stem Cell Society Singapore (SCSS) since 2010 and is currently Vice-President of the society, actively involved in organizing SCSS international conferences and promoting stem cell research in Singapore. She is the founding President of the Singapore Developmental Biology Society (2020-2022). She has been a member of the Asia-Pacific Drosophila Board (the sole representative of Singapore Drosophila researchers) since 2013 and an Associate Editor of PLOS Genetics since 2016 and Genetics since 2021. She was an elected EMBO Associate Member in 2020, a life-long honour in recognition of her research excellence and outstanding accomplishments.
Education
Doctor of Philosophy
National University of Singapore, Singapore
Bachelor of Science
East China University of Science & Technology, China