Howard Chang

Howard Y. Chang MD, PhD, is Director of the Center for Personal Dynamic Regulomes and the Virginia and D.K. Ludwig Professor of Cancer Research at Stanford University. He is also Professor of Dermatology and of Genetics at Stanford University and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Dr. Chang earned a PhD in biology from MIT, an MD from Harvard Medical School, and completed a dermatology residency and postdoctoral training at Stanford University. He is a leader in the study of the noncoding genome in cancer. He discovered a new class of genes, termed long noncoding RNAs, that can control gene activity throughout the genome, illuminating a new layer of biological regulation. He has invented new methods for defining the shapes of DNA and RNA genome-wide. The long-term goal of his research is to decipher the regulatory information in the genome to benefit human health.