Lab Members
Primary Investigator
Charles C Hong, MD, PhD, FAHA
Professor of Medicine,
Department of Cardiology Research
Tel: 410-706-2691
Email: charles.hong@som.umaryland.edu
Dr. Charles (Chaz) Hong is a physician-scientist whose research centers around chemical genetics of vertebrate development. His research functions at the intersection of developmental biology, chemical biology, stem cell biology, and cardiovascular medicine. Dr. Hong’s work includes innovative chemical biologic approaches to study embryonic development as well as implementation of the induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) technology to better understand human cardiomyocyte biology and pathobiology at the cellular level.
Charles (Chuck) H. Williams, PhD
Assistant Professor, Medicine
Tel:410-706-2683
Email: Charles.williams@som.umaryland.edu
Dr. Charles (Chuck) Williams is a basic scientist whose research centers around chemical genetics of vertebrate development and early drug discovery. His research functions at the intersection of developmental biology, chemical biology, computational biology, and personalized medicine. Dr. Williams' work includes innovative chemical biologic approaches to study embryonic development as well as developing resources to facilitate academic drug discovery.
Young Wook Chun, PhD
Assistant Professor, Medicine
Tel: 410-706-2682
Email: ychun@som.umaryland.edu
Dr. Chun received his BS and MS from Korea University and Yonsei University, respectively. He acquired his PHD in Biomedical Engineering at Brown. Dr. Chun is focused on studying cardiac maturation and exploring human heart disease using human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) and engineering tools. His scientific goals are to optimize the biophysical parameters of the ECMs, to understand the molecular basis of this process, to develop the therapeutic strategies for heart regeneration, and lastly, to create a platform using iPSC derived heart tissue for drug discovery and evaluation. Current projects are to generate cardiomyocytes derived from human iPSCs (iPSC-CMs) with congenital heart disease, to define a phenotype of congenital heart disease and, to revert diseased cardiomyocytes to normal using CRISPR/Cas9 gene correction strategy in vitro. In addition, he has investigated how single iPSC-CM with poor contractility form Heart Failure patients respond to various drugs that Hong Lab developed.
Staff
Urmila Sreenivasan MS
Research Lab Supervisor
Graduated from University of Maryland, Baltimore in Medical Research and Technology, Biotechnology, Thesis track. Joined Hong lab in June 2018. Working on patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) to model heart diseases, drug discovery and preclinical cardio toxicity evaluation.
Brittany Keyser, MS
Research Assistant
Graduated from North Carolina State University with a BS degree in Biochemistry and a MS degree in Physiology. Having joined the Hong lab in August, 2018, Ms. Keyser works with Dr. Williams on Chemical Biology of vertebrate development, identifying novel molecules that modify key signaling nodes. This work is foundational to the Chemical Phenomics Initiative. Her focus area is understanding the molecular mechanisms of small molecule modulators of GPR68.