Xin Tang received his doctoral training in the laboratory of Gong Chen at Pennsylvania State University, focusing his work on defining genetic and environmental factors regulating synaptic signal transmission, with his work leading to the discovery that the neuronal gene KCC2 plays a role in the functional deficits observed in Rett syndrome.

Tang went on to join the laboratory of Rudolf Jaenisch at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for postdoctoral training, where he utilized molecular biology tools such as CRISPR and human stem cell manipulations to develop a drug-screening platform to isolate novel compounds that modulate KCC2 activity. Tang now plans to use these novel KCC2 modulators to gain insights into the molecular pathways underlying KCC2 dysregulation and to validate the hypothesis that reduction in KCC2 expression is a core mechanism underlying autism.