Danwei Huangfu

Danwei Huangfu, PhD, leads the Huangfu Lab at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC), where she holds appointments in the Developmental Biology Program, Center for Stem Cell Biology, Center for Cell Engineering, and Gerstner Sloan Kettering Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. She earned her PhD from Cornell University's Weill Graduate School of Medical Sciences and a BS from Fudan University.

Her research focuses on human development and disease mechanisms using stem cell models and CRISPR technologies. Key areas include:

• Precision gene editing in human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs)
• Transcriptional and epigenetic regulation of pancreatic development
• CRISPR screening for diabetes-relevant pathways
• Enhancer discovery and 3D genome architecture
• Therapeutic targeting of type 1 and type 2 diabetes

Her publication trends reveal concentrated work in CRISPR-based functional genomics (2021-2024), with recent focus on metabolic regulation in diabetes (2024) and enhancer dynamics (2023). Earlier work established foundational methods for inducible genome editing in stem cells.

Major Awards:

• Basil O’Connor Scholar (March of Dimes, 2012-2014)
• Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. Young Investigators Award (2011-2014)
• Harvard Catalyst & InnoCentive Award (2010)
• Helen Hay Whitney Postdoctoral Fellowship (2006-2009)

Dr. Huangfu actively mentors graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, with 11+ advised PhD candidates. She leads NIH-funded projects including:

• The MSK MorPhiC consortium for phenotypic null allele characterization
• Center for scalable knockout and phenotyping in diverse genomes
• Enhancer discovery for diabetes research

The lab collaborates with the Ziv Lab on neuroendocrine cancer modeling and maintains an active CRISPR reagent repository through Addgene.