Shen, Hongyuan

Shen Hongyuan received her B.Sc. (Hons) in Life Sciences with concentration in Molecular and Cell Biology from National University of Singapore. After graduation, she joined Ding Xiang Liu’s lab in IMCB/A*STAR as a lab biologist working on genetic engineering of recombinant Coronaviruses as viral vectors harboring reporter genes for gene delivery. She received her PhD training in zebrafish development under the guidance of Vladimir Korzh in IMCB/A*STAR. During her PhD, she conducted Tol2-transposon mediated mutagenesis screen in zebrafish from which she isolated the silent K+ channel subunit mutant kcng4b and characterized its novel function in inflating the embryonic brain ventricle. As a postdoc, she generated the zebrafish ikk2 mutant and studied the function of Ikk2/NFkB signaling in early embryonic development. She joined SNRSI in 2016, and was attached to the Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety (IRSN, France) where she investigated chromosome aberration complexity produced by neutron fields in case of a critical nuclear accident. In 2019, she started her own lab utilizing zebrafish as a premier animal model for radiobiology research. The overall goal of her lab is to understand the mechanisms controlling the spatiotemporal dynamics of cells in their native tissue environmental niche when an intact biological organism is exposed to ionizing radiation, and hence derive potential intervention points whereby radiation-induced damage could be dampened.