Lab Members

Xuetong "Snow" Shen, Ph.D.
Principal Investigator

I grew up in Inner Mongolia, China. I received my B.S. in biophysics from Peking University in 1991.  I spent five years as a graduate student in Molecular and Cell Biology, studying histone function in Tetrahymena with Martin A. Gorovsky, Ph.D., at the University of Rochester. During my postdoctoral training at NIH with Carl Wu, Ph.D., I continued to focus on chromatin and characterized a new class of chromatin remodeling complexes, the INO80 class. I have been an associate professor at MD Anderson since 2002. My lab is interested in the role of chromatin in nuclear functions. For people who are curious about “Snow," my Chinese name is 申雪桐, and the middle character “雪” means “Snow."

Yuan Zhong
Postdoctoral Fellow

I graduated from Tianjin Medical University with a bachelor’s degree in medicine, and obtained my Ph.D. training in the lab of Oscar Aparicio, Ph.D. at the University of Southern California. There I used Saccharomyces cervisiae to study the role of Cdc7 in DNA replication fork progression in response to DNA damage. My current research is focused on defining the function of post-translationally modified actin in the nucleus.

Jing Xiao
Research Assistant II

I received my Bachelor of Chinese Medicine Pharmacy at Chengdu University of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Sichuan P.R. China, and then worked as a pharmacist in Tianjin for three years. In 2005, I received my Master of Computer Information Systems at Colorado State University.

Amelie Albrecht
Graduate Student

I grew up in Bavaria, Germany and received my B.Sc. in Molecular Medicine from the University of Regensburg. During that time, I also worked at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with Rupa Sridharan, Ph.D., studying epigenetic barriers underlying the reprogramming of somatic cells to iPSCs. My current research is focused on characterizing the roles of actin post-translational modifications in the nucleus.

Former Trainees and Friends

Ashby Morrison, Ph.D.
Stanford University
Morrison Lab

Maria D. Person, Ph.D.
Director of the Proteomics Facility, UT Austin
Proteomics Facility

Prabodh Kapoor, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
UT Health Northeast - University of Texas Health Science Center at Tyler