David Wu, PhD

Graduate Student

Daniel Lim, University of California, San Francisco

I'm an aspiring physician-scientist passionate about genomics and precision medicine in human skin disease.

I first became drawn to genomics research as an undergraduate at UVa. Under the mentorship of Dr. Anindya Dutta, MD-PhD, I applied genetic screens to study the regulation of oncogenes, and also learned how personalized medicine was transforming oncology. I then pursued a NIH fellowship with Dr. Anthony Fauci, where I analyzed how immunologic gene signatures could predict treatment response in patients undergoing novel antiviral therapies.

Inspired by the intersection of human disease, computational analytics, and large-scale experimental approaches, I came to UCSF for MD-PhD training. Dr. Dan Lim, MD-PhD, served as my doctoral advisor and Dr. Jonathan Weissman, PhD, served as the Chair of my thesis committee. In this setting, I developed expertise in CRISPR, genomics, and single-cell technologies, with an emphasis on high-throughput functional perturbation strategies such as single-cell Perturb-Seq and genome-wide screens for complex phenotypes. My main project - published in Cell Genomics - leveraged these technologies to systematically dissect both coding and noncoding genomes in the control of human stem cell differentiation into other cell types. In doing so, my work discovered hundreds of genes that control the production of neural progenitor cells and also illuminated new, fundamental principles of how our cells make these complex decisions.

Going forward, I hope to continue applying my collective clinical, computational, and experimental experience toward improving the lives of patients suffering dermatologic disease.