Shengdar Q. Tsai, PhD
Dr. Tsai is an Associate Member in the Department of Hematology at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. His lab’s research focuses on developing genome editing technologies for therapeutics, with a special interest in editing human HSCs for treatment of hemoglobinopathies such as sickle cell disease and T-cells for cancer immunotherapy. In 2020, he was chosen as one of the American Society for Gene and Cell Therapy Outstanding New Investigators.
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His group has recently developed CHANGE-seq, a state-of-the-art, sensitive, unbiased, high-throughput method for defining the genome-wide activity of genome editors (Lazzarotto et al. Nature Biotechnology 2020). Previously, he has led the development of methods for high-throughput genome editing with TALENs (Reyon and Tsai et al. Nature Biotechnology 2012), CRISPR-Cas genome editors with improved specificity by dimerization (Tsai et al. Nature Biotechnology 2014), widely adopted methods to define the genome-wide specificity of CRISPR-Cas nucleases such as GUIDE-seq (Tsai and Zheng et al. Nature Biotechnology 2015) and CIRCLE-seq (Tsai et al. Nature Methods 2017 and Lazzarotto et al. Nature Protocols 2018).
Dr. Tsai completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital & Harvard Medical School, Ph.D. in Functional Genomics and M.S. in Bioinformatics from North Carolina State University, and B.S. from the University of Michigan.

shengdar.tsai at stjude.org
Tsai Lab Members

Jaqueline Chyr
Senior Bioinformatics Scientist

Claire Greene
Researcher

Nikolay Malinin
Senior Scientist
Joey LaMattina
Scientist

Diego Pulgarin
Post-doctoral Fellow

Duane Currier
Director of Automation

Kasey Jividen
Post-doctoral Fellow

Garret Manquen
Researcher
Ginny Nguyen
Lead Researcher

Harshita Sharma
Scientist

Ashley Flory
Associate Scientist

Varun Katta
Scientist

Azusa Matsubara
Scientist

Kiera O'Keefe
Graduate Student

Rachael Wood
Lead Researcher
Tsai Lab Alumni

Despoina Trasanidou
Post-doctoral Fellow
Postdoctoral Fellow Sanquin

Abby Cozart
Researcher (2020 - 2022)
PhD Student at University of Colorado Anshutz Medical

Joe Slaiwa
Senior Researcher

Tiffany Yee
Researcher (2019 - 2021)
PhD Student at UT Southwestern

Elizabeth Urbina
Researcher
PhD Student at Vanderbilt University

Cicera Lazzarotto
Scientist (2022)
Lead Researcher (2021-2022)
Senior Researcher (2019-2021)
Post-doctoral Fellow (2017-2019)
Senior Scientist at Be Bio

Dreylan Hines
Researcher (2023 - 2024)
Medical Student Columbia University

Michelle Lee
Researcher (2019 - 2021)
PhD Student at Northwestern