Chongyuan Luo

Chongyuan Luo is an Assistant Professor in Human Genetics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), within the School of Medicine. His research focuses on epigenomic mechanisms underlying neurodevelopmental disorders and the development of cutting-edge genomic technologies. He holds a Ph.D. in Plant Biology from Rutgers University (2012) and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Epigenomics at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies (2019).

His research group combines experimental and computational approaches to study gene regulatory mechanisms in diseases such as schizophrenia and autism. Key projects include developing single-cell multi-omics methods (e.g., snmC-seq2, snm3C-seq) to profile DNA methylation, chromatin architecture, and transcriptomes in brain cells. These technologies enable the identification of cell-type-specific regulatory elements and epigenetic alterations linked to disease risk variants.

Luo’s work also addresses the genetic basis of neurodevelopmental disorders, exploring how epigenetic dysregulation contributes to conditions like Rett syndrome. He is a principal investigator on multiple NIH-funded grants, including projects mapping spatiotemporal epigenomic dynamics in the developing human brain and leveraging genetic variation to dissect gene regulatory networks in pluripotency.

His lab collaborates widely, contributing to large-scale initiatives like the single-cell atlas of the human brain and comparative cellular analyses across species. Notable contributions include identifying robust enhancer-gene regulatory interactions and uncovering broad transcriptomic dysregulation in autism spectrum disorders.