Dr. Shengdar Tsai

Dr. Tsai is an Assistant Member in the Department of Hematology at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. His lab’s research focuses on genome editing technologies for therapeutics, with a special interest in editing human HSCs for treatment of hemoglobinopathies such as sickle cell disease and T-cells for cancer immunotherapy. His group has recently developed CHANGE-seq, a state-of-the-art, sensitive, unbiased, high-throughput method for defining the genome-wide activity of genome editors. Previously, he has developed methods for high-throughput genome editing with TALENs, and for defining and improving the genome-wide specificity of CRISPR-Cas nucleases such as GUIDE-seq and CIRCLE-seq. Dr. Tsai completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital & Harvard Medical School, Ph.D. in Functional Genomics and M.S. in Bioinformatics from North Carolina State University, and B.S. from the University of Michigan.