Daesong Jang, Ph.D., joined the UF College of Dentistry in spring 2023 as a research assistant scientist from the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, where he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Diabetes and Digestive Kidney Disease within the Laboratory of Endocrinology and Receptor Biology.
Jang will be fully devoted to research at UFCD in the Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Diagnostic Sciences in oral medicine and the Seunghee Cha, D.D.S., Ph.D., Laboratory. Cha is also the director for UF’s Center for Orphaned Autoimmune Disorders and is an expert in Sjögren’s Syndrome.
While at the NIH, Jang’s research revolved around experiments to elucidate the thyroid-stimulating hormone receptor, or TSHR, signaling pathways in human thyroid cells. He isolated and cultured thyroid cells from human thyroid tissue to prove TSHR regulation of thyroid-specific genes and the initiation of TSHR signal transduction pathways.
Jang earned his undergraduate degree in food sciences from Korea University in Seoul, Korea, in 2001, and his master’s in pharmaceutical science from Seoul National University in 2003 where his dissertation was Antioxidative and anti-platelet activities of Crassula cv. ‘himaturi’ and the isolation of the active components. He worked as a senior scientist at a bio technology company in Korea for two years before coming to the United States and the University of Florida in 2006 to be a research assistant in the Department of Physiology and Functional Genomics in the College of Medicine.
Jang moved to Little Rock, Arkansas, in 2010 to pursue his doctoral degree in interdisciplinary biomedical sciences from the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, where his thesis was New endonuclease inhibitors and their potential therapeutic applications. After earning his Ph.D. in 2015, he returned to UF for two years as a postdoctoral associate in medicine’s Department of Pediatrics/Genetics and Metabolism before his two-year fellowship at the NIH.
