Min Han

Min Han (born 1956) is a Chinese‑American geneticist and molecular biologist at the University of Colorado Boulder, currently serving as a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Molecular, Cellular & Developmental Biology. 

Han was born in Shanghai, China. His youth and education were strongly impacted by a life-threatening tracheal stenosis and the cultural revolution under Mao Zedong. After multiple childhood surgeries and many years’ recovery at home, he overcame his medical condition. The medical crisis interrupted his classroom education, which was replaced by years of self-learning at home. After graduating from middle school in 1975, Han was sent to a farm in Anhui province to work as part of Mao’s “Up to the mountains, down to the countryside” movement, along with millions of other middle and high school graduates.

Han enrolled in Peking University in 1978 and received his BS degree in Biochemistry in 1982. He enrolled in the China-United States Biochemistry Examination and Application (CUSBEA) program (founded in 1982 by Professor Ray Wu of Cornell University and Professor Gu Xiaochen of Peking University) that connected rising Chinese students with Ph.D. programs in the US.^[1] In 1983, Han became a graduate student at UCLA. He joined the lab of Dr. Michael Grunstein where he studied the functions of histones and nucleosomes in transcription, earning a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology in 1988. He completed his postdoctoral training in the lab of Dr. Paul Sternberg at CalTech, where he studied developmental genetics.

Han opened his own research lab at the University of Colorado Boulder in 1991 in the Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology. In a 2015 discussion of his lab's research approach, Han asserted that his lab has encouraged risk-taking and allowed researchers to follow their own ideas, leading to new research directions, including the study of lipids, KASH-SUN complexes, miRNAs, and genetic redundancy.^[2][3] Han was selected to become an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 1997,^[4] was given the title of Distinguished Professor in 2019,^[5] and became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2024.^[6][7]

Han worked on exploring the functions of histone proteins in transcriptional regulation under the guidance of his graduate mentor Dr. Michael Grunstein. When Dr. Grunstein was awarded the prestigious Lasker Award in 2018, Han's 1988 Cell paper^[8] with Grunstein was listed as a key publication for the award.^[9]

Han's postdoctoral advisor was Dr. Paul Sternberg. In the Sternberg lab, Han discovered the C. elegans ras gene let-60, and its role in controlling developmental decisions (Han & Sternberg 1990, Cell).^[10][11][12]

Major scientific discoveries made in the Min Han Lab at the University of Colorado include:

• Discovered and analyzed the roles of a number of regulators of the conserved RTK-RAS-MPK signaling pathway; discovered many unknown roles of tumor suppressors in development and stress responses.^[13][14]
• Established the concept of universal pairing of SUN-KASH proteins (LINC complexes) at the nuclear envelope and pioneered the study of their functions in multiple cellular/developmental events in both C. elegans and mice.^{[15][16][17][18]}
• Discovered the role of GW182 family proteins in miRISCs and pioneered a biochemical method to systematically analyze the in vivo miRNA-target interactions; discovered miRNA-like regulatory function for apoptotic caspases.^{[19][20][21][22]}
• Uncovered novel functions of fatty acid variants and multiple novel mechanisms by which animals sense the level of specific fatty acids and nucleotides to regulate animal development and behaviors.^{[23][24][25][26][27]}
• Discovered "surprising" beneficial roles for two bacteria-derived molecules in animal physiology that indicates new paradigms pertinent to microbe-host interactions (enterobactin and peptidoglycan muropeptides).^{[28][29][30][31][32]}

• 2024 Elected Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences^[33][34]
• 2019 Named Distinguished Professor by the University of Colorado Boulder^[35]
• 2011 Elected Fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science
• 1997–2018 Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI)^[36]
• 1993–1996 Searle Scholar^[37]
• 1992-1995 Basil O'Connor Scholar, March of Dimes Foundation^[38]
• 1991–1997 Lucille P. Markey Scholar^[39]
• 1988–1991 Fellow of the Life Science Research Foundation^[40]