*Biography*
Joo-Hyeon Lee was fascinated by stem cell research through PhD studies under the supervision of Prof. Daesik Lim in KAIST, Korea. She then joined Prof. Carla Kim’s laboratory in Harvard Medical School where she became interested in the study of adult lung stem cells. She established her own research group at the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute in 2016 and focuses on understanding cellular behaviour and regulatory networks of adult stem and niche cells.

*Research Interests*
What are the regulatory mechanisms that control homeostatic turnover, and how do their perturbation contribute to disease progression? Lungs are slow turnover organs that are highly quiescent at steady-state. However, the lung has a tremendous ability to repair epithelial damage following injury and contains multiple, highly plastic, stem cell populations. We are interested in understanding how stem cells respond to different signals from their local environment and orchestrate the changes in chromatin, transcription, translation, and cellular dynamics in homeostasis and injury repair. Questions that we are trying to address are: 1) what mechanisms regulate the transition of cells from quiescent to dividing and back again? 2) How do distinct cell types sense different injuries? 3) Which cell populations have the flexibility to de-differentiate and when are these complementary repair mechanisms used? Elucidating the normal process of lung dynamics will provide us a foundation to understand lung diseases and cancer.