Jonathan Tsai

About Jonathan Tsai

Jonathan is principal investigator at the Tsai Lab and Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital. 

Whether as a Chinese-American expatriate in Belgium or a Fulbright scholar in Israel, Jonathan has learned to value all facets of life. As the son of Chinese immigrants, Jonathan grew up in Silicon Valley and moved to Brussels with his family as a teenager. Jonathan graduated with honors from the California Institute of Technology, where he worked in the laboratory of Dr. David Baltimore and developed and patented a technology to isolate T-cell receptor genes from single tumor infiltrating cells, creating new proteins able to kill melanomas. 

After graduation, Jonathan was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to study human and cancer growth factors at Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science, resulting in publications in leading scientific journals. In his first year of medical school at Stanford University, Jonathan worked with a twelve-year-old living with leukemia, whose optimism and humor inspired Jonathan to focus on oncology. Jonathan finished his MD and PhD under Dr. Irving Weissman, developing new tools to study blood and stem cell contributions to solid organ development, regeneration, and fibrosis. 

Jonathan completed his Clinical Pathology Residency and Molecular Genetics Pathology fellowship at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital. He was a postdoctoral scholar at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute where he worked with Dr. Benjamin Ebert and identified a common degradation mechanism across nuclear hormone receptors. Jonathan now leads his own group at the Brigham and Women's Hospital / Harvard Medical School, where he studies how the ubiquitination and protein stability of hormone receptors, and transcription factors more broadly, lead to cancer. His lab is also designing and testing new small molecules to treat hormone-driven diseases.