Dr. Shan Zha is the James A. Wolff Professor of Pediatrics at Columbia University Medical Center and an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation since 2022. Her lab studies the mechanism of DNA damage response and DNA double-strand break repair, especially non-homologous end-joining pathways. Using mouse models, they have revealed the physiological impact of DNA repair defects in immune system maturation, lymphomagenesis, and hematological toxicities of cancer therapies. In the past decade, they have generated and characterized several novel mouse models with NHEJ defects and animal models carrying the catalytically inactive mutation in ATM, ATR, DNA-PKcs, and PARPs, revealing a catalyzes-coupled allosteric regulation of DNA damage response factors. During this process, her lab expanded the role of Ku and DNA-PKcs into RNA biology and RNA-mediated immune responses.

Dr. Shan Zha grew up in Beijing, graduated from Peking University Health Center, and completed her Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins Medical Institute, focusing on human prostate cancer genetics. She completed her post-doctoral training at the Harvard Medical School and the Children’s Hospital in Boston with Dr. Frederick Alt at HHMI, before starting her lab at Columbia University.