Two New Stem Cell Scientists Join UCLA Faculty

The UCLA Broad Stem Cell Research Center actively participates in cross-disciplinary collaborations across campus to accelerate the pace of scientific breakthroughs for the treatment of disease. The center’s involvement in multiple recruitment partnerships affirms its commitment to pool resources to attract and retain top talent whose commitment to basic scientific questions and clinical applications is invaluable for the advancement of personalized cellular therapies.

Most recently, the center joined with the departments of molecular cell and developmental biology and microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics to recruit two esteemed faculty to UCLA, Dr. Leanne Jones and Dr. Lili Yang, respectively. Drs. Jones and Yang join a cadre of more than 200 affiliate stem cell center faculty whose research efforts are instrumental to the realization of our mission.

Dr. Leanne Jones focuses her research on uncovering the consequences of aging. Aging is the primary risk factor for many degenerative diseases, metabolic disorders, cancer, and other diseases. By studying the factors that contribute to decreased stem cell function caused by aging, Jones seeks to understand the effect of aging on stem cell behavior in order to identify what leads to degenerative age-related diseases to develop potential regenerative medicine strategies for using tissue stem cells to treat age-onset diseases.

Dr. Lili Yang focuses her research on gaining an understanding of how the immune system responds to attack by chronic diseases from a molecular level, hoping to use that knowledge to help design effective therapies that will activate the immune system in fighting disease. Through her research, Dr. Yang seeks to engineer the immune systems of patients suffering from cancer and AIDS by manipulating their own blood cells to fight their diseases.

The UCLA Broad Stem Cell Research Center looks forward to sharing the continued successes and research milestones achieved by our world-renowned faculty and especially those by our newest stem cell faculty, Drs. Jones and Yang.