Jane Ying Wu


Jane Ying Wu was a China-born American neuroscientist who served as professor of neurology at the Feinberg School of Medicine of Northwestern University.
Wu died by suicide at her home in Chicago in 2024 after the forced closure of her laboratory at Northwestern University, a place she served as professor for nearly two decades. Her research area was in the field of post-transcriptional gene regulation and its involvement in human pathogenesis.

Early life and education

Born in 1963 in the city of Hefei, Anhui, China. She lived with her grandmother while her parents were in a labor camp.
Wu attended Shanghai Medical University for undergraduate studies and graduated with a Bachelor of Medicine in 1986. She traveled to the United States for graduate studies and received a Doctor of Philosophy in cancer biology from the Stanford University School of Medicine in 1991. Her doctoral dissertation was titled, Molecular studies of hepatitis B virus, and her doctoral advisor was William S. Robinson. Wu explicitly stated "Dedicated to the memory of martyrs of June Fourth, 1989" on page 8 at the beginning of her doctoral dissertation.

Career

After receiving her doctorate, Wu conducted postdoctoral research at Harvard University. Wu spent ten years at Washington University School of Medicine, where she served as an assistant professor and then as an associate professor in pediatrics, molecular biology, and pharmacology.
In 2005, Wu joined Northwestern University where her research concentrated on two closely related biological processes, RNA splicing and the role of regulatory RNA-binding proteins. She led a neurology and genetics laboratory at the Feinberg School of Medicine. By 2007, she was the Charles Louis Mix Professor of Neurology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. The same year, she was elected to the American Society for Clinical Investigation.
In 2009, Wu was invited "by the Chinese government under the Thousand Talents Plan to help run a lab and train students" at the Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Research

Her research interests centered on post-transcriptional gene regulation and its involvement in human diseases. She focused on pre-mRNA splicing, a crucial process in eukaryotic gene expression that played a significant role in genetic diversity. Defects in pre-mRNA splicing were linked to the development of numerous human disorders. Wu's research team investigated the mechanisms that regulated pre-mRNA splicing and alternative splicing in genes essential for cell death and neuronal function. They specifically examined how splicing defects contributed to neurodegenerative diseases such as frontotemporal dementia and retinal degeneration. Additionally, Wu explored the fundamental processes involved in tumor development and metastasis. Her discovery of how a neuronal migration signal modulated chemokine activity provided new insights into chemokine regulation, uncovering a conserved mechanism that controlled cell migration across various cell types. Her lab also studied the role of neuronal guidance cues in tumor metastasis and developed new approaches to address inflammatory diseases.

Personal life

Wu met her husband Rao Yi at Shanghai Medical University, where Wu was an undergraduate medical student and Rao was a master's student.

Death

After Wu's lab was shut down by Northwestern University, Wu died by suicide at her home in Chicago on July 10, 2024. After nearly two decades professorship at Northwestern University, all of her web pages at Northwestern University were immediately removed by Northwestern University, with no obituary issued by the university. Researchers from multiple universities and leaders of social organizations were shocked by the incident. The South China Morning Post stated that the China Initiative by the United States federal government was related to the forced closure of her laboratory.