Ping Chen

Ping Chen received her Ph.D. training from Dr. Mark Hochstrasser at the University of Chicago, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, for her studies of the yeast ubiquitin-proteasome pathway. She subsequently moved to the laboratory of Dr. Neil Segil at the House Ear Institute, Los Angeles, where she started to use the mammalian inner ear as a model system to explore molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying morphogenesis of multicellular organs. In 2003, she joined the faculty at the Emory University and has been an assistant professor in the Department of Cell Biology since. Currently, Dr. Chen is focused on the signaling pathways that regulate coordinated polarization of cells along the plane of a cell sheet, known as planar cell polarity. She primarily uses mouse inner ear sensory organs, the hearing organ in the cochlea and the balance organs in the vestibule, to address several issues in vertebrate planar cell polarity signaling. In particular, her laboratory is exploring the mechanisms that regulate cellular intrinsic polarity and the mechanisms that coordinate cellular polarity among neighboring cells during terminal differentiation of the inner ear sensory organs.