Dr. Eric Greer from Harvard Medical School Lectured at SYSH

On the afternoon of October 19th, Dr. Eric Greer from Harvard Medical School visited Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hospital (SYSH) and gave a lecture entitled “DNA methylation on N6-adenine in Metazoans”. Dr. Erwei Song (Vice President of SYSH), Dr. Qiang Liu (Director of International Office), Dr. Dong Yin (Director of Medical Research Center), and Dr. Jianpei Fang (Director of Pediatrics Department), met with Dr. Greer and attended the lecture.

At the lecture, Dr. Greer gave a detailed introduction about DNA methylation on N6-adenine and elucidated the regulatory mechanism of epigenetic information upon complex phenotypes such as physical appearance, energy metabolism, psychological state, and longevity. He also provided a huge amount of data from his lab to suggest that understanding the molecular determinants of stable epigenetic memory might shed light on prolonging the life spans of human beings. The lecture attracted over 50 professors, young doctors and medical students from SYSH.

On the same date, Dr. Greer also visited the hospital’s history exhibition room and got to know about its impact on the development of western medicine and western medical education in China. Dr. Greer’s visit to SYSH has not only helped to further the exchanges between Harvard Medical School and SYSH, but also deepened the collaboration in scientific research and talent training in both parties.   

Dr. Greer is assistant professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and the principal investigator at Division of Newborn Medicine in Boston Children’s Hospital. He completed his PhD studies in Stanford University in 2010 and carried out his post-doctoral training in Stanford and Harvard until 2014. In 2015, he was appointed as assistant professor by Harvard. He has established his own lab to identify epigenetic inheritance phenotypes and to elucidate the mechanisms behind their transmission across generations. For the past five years, he has won several important honors and published 13 first-author research articles in journals such as Cell and Nature. He has also been invited to speak at international meetings such as Cell Symposium and Cold Spring Harbor Conference. Dr. Greer is the board editor for Environmental Epigenetics, and the reviewer for journals such as Aging Cell, BMC Genetics, PLoS Genetics, PLoS One, etc.