Yu-Hung Hung
Principal Investigator
Spearhead Bio
Yu-Hung Hung, Ph.D., is Principal Investigator at Spearhead Bio, where her research focuses on advancing the company’s plant genome engineering platform. Her work combines the natural DNA-moving capabilities of transposable elements with CRISPR targeting to improve the precision and efficiency of inserting DNA into crop genomes.
Before joining Spearhead Bio, Yu-Hung was a Senior Research Scientist in Dr. Keith Slotkin’s laboratory at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center. There, she investigated the molecular mechanisms governing epigenome dynamics and gene silencing and helped develop transposase-assisted target-site integration for plant genome engineering. She is a co-author of the 2024 Nature paper describing this work.
Yu-Hung earned her Ph.D. in Plant Biology from North Carolina State University, where she studied DEMETER-mediated active DNA demethylation and its role in embryo and endosperm development. Her doctoral research used genetic engineering, transgenic complementation, whole-genome bisulfite sequencing, and methylome analysis to investigate the biological function of DEMETER.