Leading brain development and gene regulation researcher Gao Zhonghua has joined a newly established university in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen after more than two decades working in the United States.

Gao became a full-time research professor at the Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology (SUAT) last month, according to the university website.

Officially approved in 2024, SUAT is a research-focused institution aimed at training talent for cutting-edge industries such as biomedicine and artificial intelligence.

Before returning to China, Gao was a tenured associate professor at the Pennsylvania State University’s College of Medicine in Hershey.

There, he led a multi-year multimillion-dollar project funded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study how cells determine and maintain their identity – a process essential to brain development that, when disrupted, can lead to autism and diseases such as cancer.

One of his most influential studies – a 2012 paper in Cell on how gene-silencing proteins are assembled and function – has been cited over 1,000 times by other researchers.