Wei Niu, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, University of Michigan

SFARI Investigator Website

Wei Niu is an assistant professor in the Department of Neurology at the University of Michigan. She received her Ph.D. degree in cell and molecular biology from the University of Texas at Austin. She completed her postdoctoral training at Yale University and studied transcriptional regulation. Following her postdoctoral training, she applied her expertise in functional genomics to study molecular mechanisms of autism as a research scientist in the Department of Genetics at the Yale University School of Medicine.

Niu joined University of Michigan as a faculty member in 2016. She also manages the Human Stem Cell and Gene Editing Core for Michigan Medicine that specializes in disease modeling using human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs). Her work has focused on identifying the molecular and cellular mechanisms that are important for human neurodevelopment and neural network formation, and how they are altered in neurodevelopmental disorders and developmental epileptic encephalopathy using hPSC-derived brain organoid models. Her long-term goal is to discover novel mechanistic-based therapeutics for various brain disorders such as autism spectrum disorders and epilepsy.

Funded Projects

Antisense oligonucleotide therapy of X-linked protocadherin 19-related autism and epilepsy

Awarded: 2021
Award Type: Targeted: Genomics of ASD: Pathways to Genetic Therapies

SFARI Funded Publications

The autism-associated chromatin modifier CHD8 regulates other autism risk genes during human neurodevelopment. Cotney J., Muhle R., Sanders S., Liu L., Willsey A.J., Niu W., Liu W., Klei L., Lei J., Yin J., Reilly S.K., Tebbenkamp A.T., Bichsel C., Pletikos M., Sestan N., Roeder K., State M., Devlin B., Noonan J.

Coexpression networks implicate human midfetal deep cortical projection neurons in the pathogenesis of autism. Willsey A. J., Sanders S., Li M., Dong S., Tebbenkamp A.T., Muhle R., Reilly S.K., Lin L., Fertuzinhos S., Miller J.A., Murtha M.T., Bichsel C., Niu W., Cotney J., Ercan-Sencicek A.G., Gockley J., Gupta A., Han W., He X., Hoffman E., Klei L., Lei J., Liu W., Liu L., Lu C., Xu X., Zhu Y., Mane S.M., Lein E.S., Wei L., Noonan J., Roeder K., Devlin B., Sestan N., State M.