Meilei Jin
Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China
As a researcher at early career stage, Dr Mei Lei Jin has a relatively long history (7 years) in translational melanoma research. He is currently leading the cell death group of melanoma research laboratory that comprises 2 visiting academics, 4 PhD students and 1 research assistant. In the past 5 years, he has published 24 research articles in high impact journals including Nature Communications, PNAS, Cancer Research, Autophagy, Oncogene, Cell Death and Differentiation and Stem cells.
Since Dr Jin joined in HMRI in 2013, as the Chief Investigator A, he has attracted an National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) project grant, 2 Hunter Medical Research Institute project grants and a Faculty of Health and Medicine Strategic Pilot Grant. In addition, as a Chief Investigator, Dr Jin has received a number of competitive grants from other sources including the National Natural Science Fund of China and Faculty of Health and Medicine. Particularly, he was awarded Hunter Translational Cancer Research Unit Fellowship in 2013 and a highly competitive Cancer Institute NSW Early Career Fellowship in 2014.
Dr Jin has served as a reviewer to assess grant applications for national and international funding bodies including NHMRC and the National Natural Science Fund of China. He also has been invited to review manuscripts for a number of journals including Cancer Research, Oncogene, Neoplasia, Molecular Cancer Therapeutics, Molecular Cancer Research, and PLOS One. Dr Jin actively participates in activities of academic organizations, including American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), the Australia and New Zealand Melanoma Trials Group, Melanoma Institute Australia, Melanoma Tumour Group of the Hunter New England Area Health, and Hunter Medical Research Institute.
Dr Jin has ongoing collaborations with a large number of researchers locally, nationally, and internationally. In particular, he has established productive collaborations with researchers in China, including Professor Zhiyin Song of Wuhan University and Professors Mian Wu and Yide Mei of the University of Science and Technology of China. These collaborations not only enable him to attract international students and visiting academics to the laboratory, but also make possible for him as a collaborator to apply for funding from various sources in China. He also provides a consultancy service to other researchers in Newcastle on molecular biology and biochemistry techniques on a daily basis.
Dr Jin pioneered studies on “overcoming resistance mechanisms of melanoma cells to chemotherapy and targeted therapy”, which has provided a number of insights into resistance mechanisms of melanoma to cell death induced by various treatments. He was also among the first to show that p53 (a common tumour suppressor gene) played a pro-survival role in melanoma cells upon endoplasmic reticular stress (a type of cellular 'stress' that occurs in many types of cancer). More recently, Dr Jin has become a leading figure in investigation of the roles of microRNAs and Receptor-Interacting Protein Kinases in regulation of melanoma cell survival and proliferation.
Dr Jin is actively engaged in communications with the general public, in particular, melanoma patients and their friends and relatives. He regularly presents the work in lay language to various community groups, such as members of Newcastle Melanoma Foundation and Melanoma Institute Australia. He also writes newsletters for these organizations.
Neuroscience, Cancer, Neuropsychology
