Bing Ren

Bing Ren PhD is Professor in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at UC San Diego School of Medicine and a member of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research. He is a world leader in chromatin biology and epigenomics, best known for developing and deploying ATAC-seq (Assay for Transposase-Accessible Chromatin with high-throughput sequencing) in collaboration with colleagues, and for landmark studies of 3D genome organisation and cis-regulatory elements in normal and cancer cells. His laboratory produced some of the first comprehensive maps of enhancers, promoters, and topologically associating domains (TADs) across the human genome, and demonstrated how alterations in chromatin accessibility and 3D genome structure drive oncogene activation in cancer. Ren's group has applied single-cell ATAC-seq (scATAC-seq) at scale to characterise tumour heterogeneity and identify cancer-specific regulatory programmes in diverse malignancies including glioblastoma, colorectal cancer, and leukaemia. He led major contributions to the ENCODE project and the 4D Nucleome Programme. His work connecting non-coding somatic mutations to enhancer dysregulation in cancer provides a mechanistic framework for interpreting the large fraction of the cancer genome that lies outside protein-coding sequences. Ren is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.