About
Juli Wang acquired her Honours degree and Master's in Molecular Genetics at the University of Toronto, Canada. Before her PhD, her research was conducted at Professor Benjamin Blencowe's lab and focused on the canonical splicing of RNA in the mammalian brain. After moving to Australia in 2019, Juli Wang acquired her PhD at UNSW by investigating the molecular evolution and epigenetic regulation in the mammalian brain. She is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher under the supervision of Prof. Irina Voineagu. Currently, Juli is employing bioinformatics, molecular genetics, and functional multi-omics to pursue two research aims. The first aim is to investigate the epigenetic regulation of brain development and neural developmental disorders, such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and intellectual disorder (ID). To this end, Juli combines single-cell omic analyses, brain organoids technology, and genetic editing to dissect the role of epigenetic regulators during corticogenesis in brain organoids derived from patients and healthy individuals. Another aim of Juli's research is to characterize the crosstalk between canonical RNA splicing and circular RNA in the human brain. To this end, Juli employs CRISPR-dCas9 and CRISPR-Cas13 to silence different RNA species, thereby dissecting the role of circRNA, splicing regulators, and canonical splicing events in neuronal cell lines derived from the human brain.