The goal of our research:The primary goal of our research is to elucidade the key mechanisms that control gene regulation, in particular nascent transcription and RNA processing, in the native chromatin environment of mature and differentiating mammalian cells. Specifically, we seek to understand how post-initiation regulatory events are established in a dynamic chromatin environment in cells and how these regulatory mechanisms control neuronal cell differentiation. We are also interested in how a dysregulation of nascent transcription and RNA processing causes human diseases such as cancer and neurological disorders.Our toolbox:We address these fundamental questions through an interdisciplinary combination of high-resolution genome-wide approaches, genome engineering techniques, biochemical methods, bioinformatics tools, and super-resolution microscopy. We are also developing new quantitative methods, including transcriptome-wide high-resolution nascent RNA analysis approaches, to study the molecular mechanisms that control nascent RNA synthesis and RNA processing in mammalian cells.