J. Keith Joung is Associate Professor of Pathology at Harvard Medical School and Associate Chief of Pathology for Research at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is also the Director of the Molecular Pathology Unit, an Associate Pathologist, and a member of the Center for Cancer Research at Massachusetts General Hospital.
He received his A.B. in Biochemical Sciences from Harvard College in 1987 and his M.D. and Ph.D. (in Genetics) from Harvard Medical School in 1996. His Ph.D. work (with Ann Hochschild) focused on mechanisms of transcriptional regulation in prokaryotes. He completed residency training in Clinical Pathology at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1999 and a post-doctoral research fellowship in Carl Pabo’s lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2001.
Dr. Joung’s research interests include understanding how Cys2His2 zinc fingers, the most common domain encoded in the human genome, mediate specific protein-DNA and protein-protein interactions. In addition, Dr. Joung’s lab uses a combination of directed randomization and bacterial cell-based selection methods to engineer artificial “designer” zinc finger domains with desired DNA-binding specificities. The ability to direct functional domains (e.g.--transcriptional regulatory or endonuclease domains) to specific genomic loci using these customized DNA-binding domains will have important applications as tools for biological research and as potential therapeutics for molecular medicine and gene therapy.
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