University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

About the Speaker:

Prof. Song Baoliang is dean of Biochemistry Department of Wuhan University. He got his Ph.D. at the Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences of CAS in 2002 and was a post-doctoral research fellow at UT Southwestern Medical Center. He is the winner of the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars (2009), the Chief Scientist of the National Major Research Plan (2009) and the Distinguished Professor of Changjiang Scholar Program (2015). Prof. Song’s lab works on cholesterol homeostasis that is closely related to cardiovascular disease. His group has dissected the molecular pathway of intestinal cholesterol absorption and identified most of the protein in this process. He has uncovered the mechanism of sterol-regulated degradation of HMG-CoA reductase, which is a major feed-back regulation of de novo cholesterol biosynthesis. His group also identified betulin, a small molecule, which can decrease both cholesterol and fatty acid levels by inhibiting SREBP pathway.