Kevin Wei

Dr. Kevin Wei is an Assistant Professor at the UBC, Department of Zoology and a member of the Life Sciences Institute. His research program seeks to understand how transposable elements (TEs) hijack fundamental genetic and developmental processes like meiosis and embryogenesis. TEs, which make up almost half of our genome, are selfish genetic elements that copy of themselves and move around the genome. But, in doing so, they can cause devastating mutations resulting in diseases like cancers. While robust defense mechanisms keep them inactive, they evolve ways to evade control to create more copies. This in turn puts pressure on the genome to adapt in order to re-establish control. TEs and the genome are thus in a constant cat-and-mouse game which precipitates profound changes over evolutionary time. Since his PhD at Cornell University, Dr. Wei has been studying this fundamental dynamic using the charismatic model organism – the fruit fly. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California Berkeley where he studied how TEs facilitates formation of sex chromosomes, he returned home to Vancouver, starting his research group at UBC.