School of Arts and Sciences
Department of Biology
Research Website JKX Science Comics

Full Profile

Khoa Tran

Khoa Tran

Assistant Professor, Biology
Khoa Tran
Research Website JKX Science Comics

Full Profile

Research/Areas of Interest

Epigenetics, Aging, Cellular senescence, and Protein Regulation

The Tran lab focuses on epigenetic regulation during cellular senescence and aging. To better understand epigenetics, imagine your DNA as a letters and epigenetics as punctuation in a sentence. As an example, we can use the following sentence:

"I'm very hungry. Let's eat, grandma."

Without changing any letters in the sentence (DNA) but the punctuation (epigenetics), we can dramatically change the interpretation of the sentence.

"I'm very hungry! Let's eat grandma!"

My overall research focuses on understanding how these punctuation changes, what mediates these changes, and how they contribute to aging and age-related disorders.

Current research projects:
• Elucidate the intersection between metabolism and epigenetics in cellular senescence and aging.
• Understand how transcriptional regulators are spatially dysregulated during aging
• Characterize the epigenetic changes during aging and age-related disorders.

Please see my lab website for more information on research projects.

Biography

Dr. Khoa Tran began his scientific journey at the University of Colorado as an undergraduate studying RNA riboswitches. After graduating, he was a research technician at Bonfils Blood Center studying the impact of lipids in transfusion products and later became a research technician at Mass General Hospital studying the mechanism of small molecules on diverse biological questions. Dr. Tran pursued his Ph.D. in Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology at the University of Wisconsin where he studied how modulation of particular small molecules, like metabolites, can regulate epigenetic enzymes during cellular reprogramming. To better understand the role of metabolism and epigenetics, he did his postdoctoral training at University of Pennsylvania where he examined the regulations of nuclear metabolic proteins in the context of aging and age-related disorders.

Outside of labs, you can find Dr. Tran running, reading comics or fantasy novels, and playing video games.