Welcome to the Wang Group at USC
We are interested in harnessing the power of nature to create clinically useful drugs. We study the organisms that naturally produce biologically active molecules. Scientists in the lab have expertise in natural products isolation and characterization, synthetic organic chemistry, synthetic biology, fungal genetics, and genomics. We are using fungal platforms developed in our lab to transform plastic waste into useful organic molecules.
Find out what we do in the Wang group. Let Jan tell you his project. For more videos check out our current projects page above.
Funding news:
06/13/23 The Wang and Williams groups have just been awarded the USC President Sustainability Research Award.
08/01/22 NIH has just funded the Wang group in collaboration with Nancy Keller and Rob O’Connor on the discovery of secondary metabolites in cryptosporidium.
Publication news:
11/03/22 Our paper on the conversion of polyethylene plastic waste into complex natural products has been published in Angewandte Chemie and featured as a Front Cover.
Our Plastic to Drugs paper is featured in Chemistry views
Publication news:
3/03/23 Our paper on the conversion of polystyrene plastic waste into complex natural products has been published in JACS and featured as a Cover.
Publication news:
07/04/23 Our paper on the elucidation of secondary metabolites from Aspergillus fumigatus has been published in Chemical Sciences and featured as a Front Cover. This is our third Cover article in 2023. We published cover articles in the flagship journals of the German, US and British (Royal) chemical societies.
Publication news:
06/01/23 Our paper on in vitro CRISPR has been published in ACS Omega.
Summer research program update. The Wang lab is not taking any additional summer students (high school or USC undergrads).
Lab News:
04/01/24 Update on our recent high school and college research students. Carolyn Kang will be attending Harvard College Class of 2028 and Christopher Wong is deciding between, UCLA, UC Berkeley, and Carnegie Mellon for college. Nathan Camarillo is deciding between, UCSF, Stanford Med, Yale Med, Wash U, and Cornell Med for med school. Ben Miller will be attending UCLA for Chemistry Ph.D..
Research news:
03/09/23 Members of the Wang group presented their research findings at the European Conference on Fungal Genetics at Innsbruck, Austria.
Congratulations to our high school summer interns Taylor Aguinaldo and Kai Herman:
03/29/23 I am happy to report that Taylor Aguinaldo will be starting UCLA this fall. Kai Herman will be starting at Rice University.
Congratulations to Dr. Christian Rabot, Dr. Bo (Eva) Yuan, and Dr. Shu-Yi (Dean) Lin for successfully defending their Ph.D. theses.
