The Dong Lab is doing the cutting-edge research on alcoholic and nonalcoholic fatty liver diseases, fibrosis, diabetes, obesity, aging, and cancer. The state-of-the-art molecular biology technologies are deployed to investigate key transcription factors like FOXOs, epigenetic regulators like sirtuins, autophagy regulators like ATG14, cell signaling regulators like sestrins, lipid metabolism enzymes like PNPLA3, and other emerging therapeutic targets.

Dr. Charlie Dong is currently a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and an investigator at the Indiana University Center for Diabetes and Metabolic Diseases. Prior to his faculty appointment at Indiana University, he got his B.S. in Biology from Shandong Normal University, M.S. in Genetics from Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, and Ph.D. in Molecular and Cellular and Developmental Biology from the Ohio State University. He also received postdoctoral training in diabetes and metabolism with Dr. Morris White at Joslin Diabetes Center and Boston Children's Hospital of Harvard Medical School. He was promoted to instructor in pediatrics at Harvard Medical School before he moved to Indiana University. Dr. Dong received an NIH K99/R00 award at the beginning of his career development, and he was also named Showalter Scholar by the Ralph and Grace Showalter Foundation. He has served on the NIH, ADA, and AASLD grant review panels.

Dr. Dong has published over 60 peer-reviewed articles, many of them on the high-impact journals including Cell Metabolism, Nature Medicine, Journal of Hepatology, and Hepatology. He has been continuously funded by NIH in the last 15 years, including 10 NIH grants.