New Faculty

Dr. Kangyun Wu joins the Department of Medicine

Dr. Kangyun Wu joined the Department of Medicine in the Division pf Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine as an Instructor on July 1, 2019.

Dr. Wu is a Senior Scientist in Dr. Michael Holtzman’s lab. He graduated from Huangzhong Agriculture University with a Bachelor of Science in Plant Protection in Wuhan, China in June 1998. He remained at Huangzhong Agriculture University by examination-exempt recommendation to complete his Master of Science in Microbiology in June 2001. In 2007, he earned his PhD degree in Microbiology from the  Institute of Microbiology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, China.

After finishing his education, Dr. Wu joined Dr. Carl Nathan’s lab as a postdoctoral associate at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City to study the role of dsRNA-dependent protein kinase in protecting the host from Mycobacterium tuberculosis. In 2010, he continued his postdoctoral training in Dr. Emil Unanue’s lab at Washington University in St. Louis to work on autoreactivity of T cells from  non-obese diabetic mice. He was extremely well trained in microbiology and cellular and molecular immunology.

Since Dr. Wu joined Dr. Michael Holtzman’s lab at Washington University in 2011, he has worked on a several projects, including the role of triggering receptor expressed on myeloid cells-2 (TREM2) in the lung chronic disease induced by Sendai virus infection, and the characterization and function of epithelial and immune cell populations in the development of chronic respiratory diseases. Some of these works were published in peer-reviewed journals such as Journal of Experimental Medicine, Journal of Clinical Investigation, Chest, and the Journal of Immunology.