Member of National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Member Editor of PNAS Editor of Plos Genetics, Plant Journal, Tropical Plant Biology Editorial Board member of RNA Biology, Current Opinion in Plant Biology Professor of Plant Cell and Molecular Biology Investigator of Howard Hughes Medical Institute - Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation(HHMI-GBMF) Center for Plant Cell Biology Institute for Integrative Genome Biology College of Natural and Agricultural Sciences(CNAS) University of California, Riverside Expertise: Epigenetics and Plant RNA Biology Chen Xuemei received her Bachelor degree from Beijing University (1988). After the completion of her degree, she entered the Ph.D. program at Cornell University in 1989 through the China-US Biology Examination and Admission (CUSBEA) program. She studied chloroplast gene expression at the Boyce Thompson Institute and obtained her Ph.D. degree in 1995. She then joined the California Institute of Technology as a postdoctoral fellow to study the genetic mechanisms underlying floral patterning. She worked as assistant professor at the Waksman Institute, Rutgers University (1999) and won the Board of Trustees Research Fellowship for Scholarly Excellence at Rutgers University (2005). She then moved to UC Riverside and was promoted to full professor in the Department of Botany and Plant Sciences in 2009 and an endowed chair professor in 2010. Chen becomes a Howard Hughes Medical Institute–Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation investigator in 2011. She is also distinguished professor of plant cell and molecular biology at the University of California, Riverside. The Chen lab is engaged in research in two major directions. In one, they are studying the biogenesis, degradation, modes of action, and biological functions of noncoding RNAs. In the other, they are dissecting the mechanisms underlying stem cell maintenance and/or termination. Her research group mainly use Arabidopsis thaliana as the model, but they also apply insights learned from Arabidopsis to animal systems. List of Key Publications : 1. Jia T, Zhang B, You C, Zhang Y, Zeng L, Johnson KC, Yu B, Li X and Chen X* (2017) The Arabidopsis MOS4-associated Complex Promotes MicroRNA Biogenesis and Precursor Messenger RNA Splicing. Plant Cell, tpc-00370. 2. You C, Cui J, Wang H, Qi X, Kuo LY, Ma H, Gao L, Mo B and Chen X* (2017) Conservation and divergence of small RNA pathways and microRNAs in land plants. Genome Biology 18(1), 158. 3. Li D, Palanca AMS, Won SY, Gao L, Feng Y, Vashisht AA, Liu L, Zhao Y, Liu X, Wu X, Li S, Le B, Kim YJ, Yang G, Li S, Liu J, Wohlschlegel JA, Guo H, Mo B, Chen X and Law JA (2017). The MBD7 complex promotes expression of methylated transgenes without significantly altering their methylation status. eLife, 6. 4. Kim YJ, Wang R, Gao L, Li D, Xu C, Mang H, Jeon J, Chen X, Zhong X, Kwak JM, Mo B, Xiao L and Chen X* (2016) POWERDRESS and HDA9 interact and promote histone H3 deacetylation at specific genomic sites in Arabidopsis. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113(51), 14858-14863. 5. Li C, Gu L, Gao L, Chen C, Wei CQ, Qiu Q, Chien C, Wang S, Jiang L, Ai L, Chen C, Yang S, Nguyen V, Qi Y, Snyder MP, Burlingame AL, Kohalmi SE, Huang S, Cao X, Wang Z, Wu K, Chen X and Cui Y (2016) Concerted genomic targeting of H3K27 demethylase REF6 and chromatin-remodeling ATPase BRM in Arabidopsis. Nature genetics 48(6), 687-693.