Xiaohua Shen, PhD is a Professor in the Center for Life Sciences (CLS) which was established in 2011 at Tsinghua and Peking Universities. Xiaohua Shen received her Ph.D in 2003 at the University of Michigan. She did the postdoctoral training with Dr. Stuart Orkin, a world-renowned stem cellbiologist, at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School. She was an Instructor at Harvard Medical School before her professorship appointmentat Tsinghua University. Her major research interest is to understand how chromatin structure influences gene expression and cell fate determination. Particularly, she has focused on the role of Polycomb group proteins in theepigenetic regulation of stem cell pluripotency. In Dr. Orkin’s lab, she made two important discoveries including the identification of EZH1 as an alternative histone H3K27 methyltransferase (Mol Cell, 2008) and JUMONJI as a novelmodulator of EZH2 (Cell, 2009). Her work has demonstrated greater complexity in the composition of the Polycomb repressive complex 2 (PRC2), which may renderepigenetic specificity during cell-fate transitions. In addition, fine-tuned, dynamic regulation of the H3K27me3 mark by PcG and associated protein controlsthe balance between self-renewal and differentiation of embryonic stem cells and is thus critical for execution of pluripotency.