Lijin Dong, Ph.D.

Dr. Lijin Dong graduated with a Bachelor of Medicine degree from Tianjin Medical College in 1983. Following this, he spent two years as a teaching and research assistant in the Department of Histology and Embryology at Tianjin Medical School and then he pursued his graduate studies in the United States. In 1996, he completed his Ph.D. training at the Department of Biological Sciences, University of Pittsburgh. During his doctoral research, he focused on investigating the interactions between extracellular matrix proteins and integrin receptors on cell surfaces using protein biochemistry and gene targeting techniques. During his PhD. Study, he established and characterized the entactin knockout mouse which was one of the first loss-of function mouse models in the field.

Dr. Dong then undertook a post-doctoral fellowship at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Here, he made contributions to the field of mammalian DNA damage repair response pathways by generating and characterizing a series of loss-of-function mouse models in the DNA-PK dependent DNA double-strand break repair pathways, some of the mouse mutants are widely utilized in studying the NHEJ pathway in the mammalian system. Shortly after his postdoctoral fellowship in the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Dr. Dong joined the Rush Medical School in Chicago as an Assistant Professor of Biochemistry. In addition to teaching responsibilities for first-year medical students, he focused his efforts to investigating chemoresistance in human ovarian cancer.

In 2004, Dr. Dong became a co-director of the Genetic Engineering Core at the National Eye Institute, National Institutes of Health. Following the retirement of his fellow co-director in 2017, he assumed the role of acting director and was later officially appointed as the director of the core. In this capacity, Dr. Dong continues to contribute to advancements in genetic engineering and its applications in the field of ophthalmology.