Jingru Fang, ScM, Ph.D.

Postdoctoral Fellow

Jingru is a budding virologist who was born and raised in China. She embarked in the US to pursue a master’s in microbiology and immunology at Johns Hopkins. As a first-gen student, she had limited research experience until she joined the Dimopoulos group (Hopkins), where Jingru started her formal research training and elucidated an intricate relationship between mosquito gut microbiota and mosquito-borne flaviviruses. To further her training in virology, Jingru took a research tech position in Mariano Garcia-Blanco’s lab at UTMB Galveston. She entered the fascinating world of RNA biology and determined that the non-coding regions in Ebola virus RNA can hijack host RNA-binding proteins to facilitate infection. Jingru then joined the PhD program at Scripps Research and sailed under a co-mentorship with Erica Ollmann Saphire (La Jolla Institute) and Juan Carlos de la Torre (Scripps) to study how multifunctional viral RNA polymerases interact with host protein networks in human cells. She also reported Ebola virus phase separation in the context of viral RNA synthesis. As a joint postdoc in the Brangwynne lab and te Velthuis lab, Jingru aims to understand conserved principles in multiple RNA virus phase separation events and their contribution to host-specific pathogenicity. Besides labbing, Jingru enjoys gardening, painting, foraging, and spending time with her cats.