Dr. Gang CHEN received his B.S. degree in Chemistry at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in 2001. He did his Ph.D. studies with Prof. Douglas TURNER in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Rochester. His Ph.D. work involved thermodynamic and NMR studies of RNA internal loops. A better understanding of the sequence dependence of thermodynamics for RNA structures will improve the accuracy of the RNA secondary structure prediction programs such as MFOLD and RNAstructure. He earned his Ph.D. in 2005. He was a postdoctoral fellow in Prof. Ignacio TINOCO’s lab in the Department of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley from January 2006 to June 2009. His research in Tinoco lab was on single-molecule mechanical unfolding and folding of RNA pseudoknots by laser optical tweezers, which provided new insights into ribosomal reading-frame regulation by cis-acting mRNA structures. He was a Research Associate in Prof. David MILLAR`s lab in the Department of Molecular Biology at The Scripps Research Institute working on HIV-1 Rev-RRE assembly using single-molecule fluorescence techniques. In July 2010, he joined the faculty in the Division of Chemistry and Biological Chemistry at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore. At NTU, Dr Gang CHEN has one optical tweezers lab, and one wet lab equipped with facilities for biophysics, molecular biology, and chemical synthesis work.