The Beckman Center Welcomes Haopeng Xiao, PhD, Assistant Professor of Biochemistry

Haopeng Xiao, PhD, joined the Department of Biochemistry in the fall of 2024.

Dr. Xiao graduated from Peking University with dual bachelor’s degrees in pharmaceutical sciences and Chinese language and literature. He then pursued a PhD in chemistry at Georgia Tech under the mentorship of Ronghu Wu, PhD, where he developed mass spectrometry (MS)-based technologies to study protein glycosylation.

Dr. Xiao then joined the lab of Edward Chouchani, PhD, at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, for his postdoctoral training. There, he pioneered a chemoproteomic approach that led to the creation of Oximouse—the first molecular map of protein cysteine redox regulation during aging. This work elucidated mechanisms of redox regulation in physiology and disease that had remained elusive for decades. Dr. Xiao also developed a mass spectrometry- and network analysis-based strategy that harnesses the genetic diversity of outbred populations to systematically uncover protein functions, annotating the role of hundreds of proteins in regulating energy metabolism.

Since Dr. Xiao joined Stanford, his research group has focused on developing MS-based strategies integrated with data science to investigate mechanisms of metabolic regulation over protein function in health and disease. His lab maps functional metabolite-protein interactions on a proteome-wide scale in living tissues, with particular emphasis on understanding the role of the ubiquitin-proteasome system in sensing metabolites to maintain metabolic homeostasis. The lab also designs activity-based protein profiling (ABPP) platforms to identify small-molecule therapeutics that selectively engage key protein drivers of metabolic disease and cancer.