Professor, Department of Medicine
Senior Investigator, Joslin Diabetes Center
Dr. Yu-Hua Tseng is a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, a Senior Investigator at the Joslin Diabetes Center, and a Principal Faculty of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. Dr. Tseng received her B.S. in medical technology and M.S in microbiology and immunology from the National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan. She earned her Ph.D. in developmental biology and cellular and molecular biology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison under the supervision of Professor Linda Schuler. Dr. Tseng received postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Professor C. Ronald Kahn at Joslin Diabetes Center. Dr. Tseng laboratory is at the forefront of research focused on understanding the physiological role and therapeutic potential of energy-burning brown fat and its related beige fat, an area of great significance to both diabetes and medicine as a whole. Work from Dr. Tseng's lab has helped establish the dynamic interplays between adipose resident stem/progenitor cells and inductive cues that act in concert to specify the development of brown and beige adipocytes and determine thermogenic function. Dr. Tseng and her colleagues have discovered that developmental growth factors, such as the BMPs and FGFs, play a critical role in thermogenic adipocyte differentiation and metabolic regulation. In additional to delineating the importance of intercellular communications within the adipose nice in adipose cell fate specification, her research also makes significant contributions to inter-organ cross-talks in maintaining energy homeostasis. Dr. Tseng and colleagues have uncovered a novel cross-talk between the constitutive brown and recruitable beige adipose depots. In addition, our work has discovered novel brown fat-derived lipid mediators, namely 12,13-diHOME and 12-HEPE, that regulate systemic nutrient utilization. As an important translational extension of the basic science research, Dr. Tseng and colleagues have demonstrated that adult human brown fat is present in defined neck locations, and human brown fat precursors can be grown and differentiated in vitro. Using clonal human brown and white fat progenitor cells, they have identified novel genetic biomarkers that predict the cells' thermogenic potential once they are matured. Recently, they have created human brown-like (HUMBLE) cells by engineering human white preadipocytes using CRISPR-Cas9-SAM-gRNA to activate endogenous uncoupling protein 1 expression. Transplantation of HUMBLE cells into mice could prevent diet-induced obesity and ameliorate metabolic syndrome. Ongoing research in Dr. Tseng's laboratory continues to explore brown and beige fat in physiological and pathophysiological conditions and has taken a broad-based approach to understand the mechanisms that underlie these processes, including cellular and molecular analysis, transgenic models, in vitro and in vivo imaging and multiomic profiling. Dr. Tseng was an Eleanor and Miles Shore Scholar in Medicine at Harvard Medical School, received the Hazel K. Stiebeling Award from Florida State University, the J. Denis McGarry Prize from Montreal Diabetes Research Center and the Armen Tashjian Award for Excellence in Endocrine Research.