Congratulations to Sara-Jane Onyeama on receiving the CIRM Training Grant Fellowship!

Professor Rong Lu was recently featured on an episode of “Lessons in Lifespan Health,” a podcast produced by the USC Davis School of Gernotology. Listen to the podcast at https://lifespanhealth.usc.edu/associate-professor-rong-lu-providing-insights-into-stem-cell-biology-in-the-context-of-aging-and-disease.

When Rong Lu joined USC as an assistant professor of stem cell biology and regenerative medicine in 2014, she knew that earning tenure would figuratively require blood, sweat and tears. But after becoming a mother, she ended up literally supplying her children’s cord blood to her lab to study how individual stem cells work together Read More…

Even within a single patient with cancer, there is a vast diversity of individual tumor cells, which display distinct behaviors related to growth, metastasis, and responses to chemotherapy. To carry out these behaviors, each cancer cell uses its genes to make the needed molecules in a unique way known as its “gene expression signature.” To Read More…

The NHLBI Emerging Investigator Award, also known as an R35 grant, funds outstanding overall research programs, rather than individual projects. The goal of this large and long-term 7-year award is to provide a stable funding environment, thereby improving productivity and facilitating nimble, ambitious, and creative research. To read more, visit https://stemcell.keck.usc.edu/usc-stem-cell-scientist-rong-lu-wins-an-nih-emerging-investigator-award/.

The Broad Innovation Award is bringing together Rong Lu and Caltech synthetic biologist Michael Elowitz. Their team will study the spatial organization of blood-forming stem and progenitor cells, also called hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells (HSPCs), which reside in the bone marrow. By pinpointing the locations of specific HSPCs, the scientists may find clues to Read More…

Why do some leukemia patients have more aggressive disease, and why do some of their cancer cells resist treatment? USC Stem Cell scientist Rong Lu is tackling these critical questions with $550,000 of support from the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s Career Development Program. The program is designed to support talented blood cancer researchers in the Read More…

Congratulations to Areen Andreasian on receiving the Fall 2019 Provost Fellowship!

Congratulations to Charles Bramlett, who has received the Keck Genomics Partnership Grant. The award consists of $10,000 in Illumina reagents that can be utilized to perform sequencing by the Keck Genomics Platform.

Growing stem cells isn’t just something faculty do in the lab. Rong Lu is one of eight of the faculty in the Department of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine who recently welcomed new babies into their families—more than half of them within the past year. Here, Dr. Lu and other faculty parents share their Read More…