Dr. Sheng Ding did his undergraduate at California Institute of Technology. After he graduated from Caltech in 1999, he joined Dr. Peter Schultz lab at the Scripps Research Institute to conduct his Ph.D. studies, which opened up new avenues for developing the future regenerative medicine. He then stayed and joined the faculty of the Chemistry and Cell Biology Departments at Scripps as an Assistant Professor in 2003. Ding is also a scientific advisor of the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation (GNF) in La Jolla, CA.The main research focus of Ding laboratory is to develop and integrate chemical and functional genomic tools to study stem cell biology and regeneration . Over the past few years, Ding and colleagues have constructed large combinatorial chemical libraries (>100,000 small molecules) and arrayed cDNA (>30,000 human and mouse genes) and RNAi (targeting over 16,000 human and mouse genes with more than three designed sequences per gene) libraries. Furthermore they have developed and implemented high throughput cellular screens of these libraries to identify small molecules and genes which can control stem cell fate in various systems (including pluripotent embryonic stem cells, multipotent adult neural stem cells and mesenchymal stem cells, and lineage-restricted somatic cells), as well as modulate specific signaling pathways. Those studies may ultimately facilitate the therapeutic application of stem cells and the development of small molecule drugs to stimulate tissue and organ regeneration in vivo.