Somsakul Wongpalee

Dr. Wongpalee, Pop in short, was a recipient of the DPST scholarship (Development and Promotion of Science and Technology talent project of Thailand). After graduated from high school, he won the Royal Thai Scholarship to study biology in the United States. Pop attended the University of Virginia (UVa) as an undergrad where he conducted a thesis which led to a discovery that a non-coding RNA can regulate cell cycle in cancer cells. Pop received a B.S. degree in biology with the highest distinction from UVa before moving on to the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) for graduate school. There, he was trained in the laboratory of professor Douglas Black, a well-known scientist in the RNA field. During this time, Pop was focusing on characterizing the mechanism of splicing site pairing across intron and the assembly of exon definition complex, using reconstituted spliceosomal complexes and quantitative mass spectrometry. In addition, at UCLA, Pop was named the winner of 2014 Paul D. Boyer teaching award, which recognizes excellence in teaching among graduate students, and in 2015, he was awarded a Ph.D. degree in molecular biology.  Afterward, Pop moved across the campus and joined a laboratory of professor Steven Jacobsen, a renown plant epigeneticist, as a post-doctoral scholar. Pop’s passion for ribonucleoprotein (RNP) complex motivated him to delve into investigating how plant RNA-directed DNA methylation (RdDM) works at molecular level. In collaboration with professor Hong Zhou, he determined cryoEM structures and plausible assembly pathway of the DDR complex, a protein complex essential for initiating RdDM.

After 14 years in the U.S., Pop returned to Thailand and assumed a faculty position at the department of microbiology, faculty of medicine at Chiang Mai University. His laboratory focuses on studying molecular aspects of an endemic bacterium, Burkholderia pseudomallei, a causative agent of melioidosis. Pop also strives to educate medical and graduate students on cutting-edge life science knowledge beyond traditional curriculum textbooks.