Dr. Qin Wang joined the Song Lab in 2018 and has a research interest focused on neurologic and neurodevelopmental disorders and how to restore the neural circuits to attenuate these diseases. To this end, Dr. Wang employs the Drosophila sensory neuron injury model to investigate how to promote robust neural repair and functional recovery. One project led to the development of two optogenetic tools, optoRaf and optoAKT, to delineate the contribution of the neurotrophic signaling pathways to neuroregeneration.

Meanwhile, Dr. Wang has been utilizing the Drosophila model to analyze the impact of patient variants on protein structure and function and looking for their substrates which could be targeted as potential therapies. The long-term goal is to identify druggable targets and develop therapies for neural repair after injury and to relieve symptoms in neurodevelopmental diseases.