Dr Lei Stanley Qi

Dr. Lei (Stanley) Qi is an Associate Professor in the Department of Bioengineering, Sarafan ChEM-H, and Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator at Stanford University. He obtained B.S. in Physics and Math from Tsinghua University, and Ph.D. in Bioengineering from University of California, Berkeley. During PhD, he studied synthetic biology of RNA devices with Dr. Adam Arkin and CRISPR mechanisms for DNA/RNA targeting by working with Dr. Jennifer Doudna. He skipped postdoc training and performed independent research as a Systems Biology Fellow (as principal investigator) at UCSF. He joined Stanford University in 2014. Dr. Qi is a major contributor to the genome editing field. His work laid a foundation for the manipulation of the human genome without editing DNA. Dr. Qi’s invention of the nuclease-deactivated dCas9 enables the first use of CRISPR for gene expression regulation in the genome, which expands the genome engineering field. His lab demonstrates the use of dCas on many aspects of studying human genomics. He develops the CRISPR technology for rewriting epigenomics, visualizing DNA in living cells, piloting technologies for manipulating the spatial organization of the 3D human genome, elucidating the multi-layer hierarchical enhancer network, and developing hypercompact genome editors for treating genetic diseases. These tools are broadly used in biology and medicine to study human genomics and clinical applications including the use of CRISPR as an antiviral strategy for SARS-CoV-2. His current research focuses on CRISPR based gene therapy and cell therapy to treat complex diseases. He has won awards including NIH Director’s Early Independence Award, Pew Biomedical Scholar, ACS Synthetic Biology Young Innovator Award, and Alfred. P. Sloan Fellow, and NSF CAREER Award.