Jian Xu, PhD., is an Associate Professor in Children’s Research Institute and Department of Pediatrics at UT Southwestern. Dr. Xu received his PhD from UCLA, and postdoctoral training with Dr. Stuart Orkin at Children’s Hospital Boston, Harvard Medical School, and joined UT Southwestern in 2014. His laboratory studies the gene regulatory processes that control blood stem cell development and how these processes go awry in blood disorders such as acute myeloid leukemia, particularly the mechanisms that control non-coding genomic elements, epigenetic gene regulation and cellular metabolism. Dr. Xu has received many awards including the ASH Merit Award in 2008 and 2009, the Helen Hay Whitney Fellowship in 2009, an NIH Career Development Award in 2011, the CPRIT Scholar in Cancer Research in 2014, the ASH Scholar in 2015, and the LLS Scholar in 2019.