Xingcheng Lin, assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, has received a Faculty Early Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The award, also known as the NSF CAREER award, is one of the highest awards the foundation gives to young faculty in the sciences.

The five-year award will support Lin’s research project entitled “Unraveling the epigenetic grammar governing chromatin organization.” The research aims to employ a predictive, sequence- and epigenetic-specific simulation model to investigate how epigenetic modifications and regulatory proteins modulate chromatin organization.

The project will integrate artificial intelligence with physics-based computational simulations to uncover how epigenetic regulation modulates chromatin structure and function, including its role in the dynamic compartmentalization of DNA within the cell. The work aims to establish detailed molecular links between specific epigenetic modifications and genome function, guiding the rational design of therapeutic strategies targeting epigenetic dysregulation, which has been implicated in numerous human diseases. Ultimately, the research aims to deepen understanding of genome organization and enhance scientists’ ability to evaluate, forecast and design preventive strategies to mitigate the adverse impacts of epigenetic dysregulation on the genome and epigenome.

Lin received his Ph.D. in biological physics from Rice University. He then completed postdoctoral work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At NC State, he is also an affiliate faculty member of the Bioinformatics Research Center and the Lampe Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering.