John Rinn

John Rinn is a pioneer in long intergenic non-coding RNA biology, having co-discovered HOTAIR and demonstrated that lncRNAs can serve as scaffolds for chromatin-modifying complexes to regulate gene expression across chromosomes. His discovery that HOTAIR recruits PRC2 and LSD1 to repress metastasis suppressor genes has been foundational for understanding lncRNA roles in cancer metastasis. He developed high-throughput approaches to identify and characterize thousands of functional lncRNAs in the human genome. His work fundamentally changed understanding of non-coding genome function in cancer.