Xinhong completed his PhD at Caltech in the lab of Viviana Gradinaru. Prior to joining Caltech he worked on the genetic impact on Alzheimer's disease whilst at Tongji University, China. He spent his senior year at MIT working on alcohol addiction. He became an iGEMer in his freshmen year. Xinhong believes that the golden age of gene therapy has arrived and is passionate about developing better tools for gene therapy tackling neurological disorders.'

Publications:

1. Cho, J.R., Chen, X., Kahan, A., Robinson, J.E., Wagenaar, D.A., Gradinaru, V.* (2021). Dorsal raphe dopamine neurons signal motivational salience dependent on internal state, expectation, and behavioral context. Journal of Neuroscience, 41, 2645-2655. 
2. Kumar, KR., Miles, T.#, Chen, X.#, Brown, D., Dobreva, T., Huang, Q., Ding, X., Luo, Y., Einarsson, PH., Greenbaum, A., Jang, MJ., Deverman, BE., Gradinaru, V.* (2020). Multiplexed Cre-dependent selection yields systemic AAVs for targeting distinct brain cell types. Nature Methods, 17, 541–550. 
3. Badimon, A., Strasburger, H.J., Ayata, P., Chen, X., Nair, A., Ikegami, A., Hwang, P., Chan, A.T., Graves, S.M., Uweru, J.O., Ledderose, C., Kutlu, M.G., Wheeler, M.A., Kahan, A., Ishikawa, M., Wang, Y., Loh, Y.E., Jiang, J.X., Surmeier, D.J., Robson, S.C., Junger, W.G., Sebra, R., Calipari, E.S., Kenny, P., Eyo, U.B., Colonna, M., Quintana, F.J., Wake, H., Gradinaru, V., Schaefer, Anne.* (2020). Negative feedback control of neuronal activity by microglia. Nature, 586, 417–423.