Dr Grace Hui-Chun Lu

Grace Lu obtained her PhD in Bioinformatics at King’s College London under the supervision of Prof. Franca Fraternali. Her doctoral research was broadly related to human genetics and proteomics using computational approaches: combining molecular modelling and bioinformatics methods, she investigated how missense variants affect biological functions by disrupting the stability of protein structures and/or protein-protein complexes.

In 2016, she joined Prof. Claudio Stern’s lab at University College London as post-doctoral research associate where her research activity focused on two topics: neural induction (cell interactions between the “organizer” and embryonic epiblast that instruct the latter to form the nervous system) and the mechanisms that position the primitive streak during gastrulation including their implications for monozygotic (MZ) twinning. For both, she used a combination of bioinformatics approaches (including developing new tools/pipelines) that integrate experimental data, such as epigenomic and transcriptomic data, to generate a dynamic Gene Regulatory Network (GRN) depicting these complex processes.

Her research has spanned a number of different fields within the biomedical sciences including structural and molecular biology, human population genetics, and developmental biology. Currently, her primary research focus is to understand the mechanisms that regulate cells to adopt cell identity and the underlying gene networks (GRNs) that orchestrate this.