Ailong Ke

Ailong Ke joins the FAS as Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry. After a three-year postdoctoral training with Nobel Laureate Jennifer Doudna at UC Berkeley, he started his independent career as an Assistant Professor at Cornell University in 2005 and rose to Full Professor in 2017. Since independence, he has been working in the areas of RNA 3’-end processing and degradation, metabolite-sensing riboswitches, and more recently, the CRISPR-Cas immunity system. Ke also strives to apply the mechanistic understanding to genome editing applications in eukaryotic cells and holds key patents in CRISPR-Cas3 and related fields. Ke has published over 50 papers in journals such as Nature, Science, Cell, Molecular Cell, NSMB, PNAS, and RNA. Ke received the Cornell Provost Research Innovation award in 2018 and RNA Society Mid-Career award in 2019. He received his BS from the University of Science and Technology of China in 1995, and PhD in Biophysics with Cynthia Wolberger from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 2002.