Principle Investigator

Bo Shen, Ph.D.

Bo is an Assistant Professor in the National Institute of Biological Sciences (NIBS) and the Tsinghua Institute of Multidisciplinary Biomedical Research (TIMBR), Beijing. He received a B.S. in Life Science from the National University of Singapore in 2008 and then enrolled in the University of Illinois College of Medicine, where he earned a Ph.D. through the Department of Pharmacology in 2015. He conducted his doctoral research in the laboratory of Xiaoping Du, where he developed a novel anti-thrombotic drug based on selective inhibition of plate integrin outside-in signaling without interfering with ligand binding function of integrins. He performed his postdoctoral research in the laboratory of Sean Morrison at UT Southwestern Medical Center and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, where he identified integrin alpha11 as a receptor for a novel bone growth factor, Osteolectin. He also discovered that Osteolectin-expressing bone marrow stromal cells form a mechanosensitive peri-arteriolar niche for osteogenesis and lymphopoiesis.