Bio
Dr. Wang graduated with a PhD from Cold Spring Harbor School of Biological Sciences in 2012 and underwent postdoctoral training at the Genome Institute of Singapore, initially working to dissect key metabolic networks in cancers, and later focusing on investigating disease mechanisms in glaucoma. He was appointed Assistant Professor at the Centre for Vision Research in 2021, with concurrent appointments in Singapore Eye Research Institute and the Genome Institute of Singapore.
Glaucoma is a group of eye diseases that lead to the degeneration of retina ganglion cells in the optic nerve. As such, it is the leading cause of blindness worldwide. However, how and why this degeneration occurs is not well understood. Dr. Wang's group is interested in deeply understanding the pathophysiology of different glaucoma subtypes in order to find new ways of preventing and curing the disease. As a starting point, we use risk genes uncovered from whole exome sequencing of large patient cohorts to discover downstream and related pathways contributing to glacuoma disease progression, in order to find clinically-relevant genetic participants in glaucoma. To this end, we have found recurrent mutations in specific genes that are strongly associated with the risk of developing specific subtypes of glaucoma. To obtain insights in the disease process and understand how these mutations confer risk, we study the functional consequences of these mutations to ascertain their roles in glaucoma.
Education
Doctor of Philosophy
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, United States
Bachelor (Science - Molecular Biology) Honours
University of Wisconsin-Madison, United States