Rate My Professor Wei Shi

Wei Shi, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine, Department of Internal Medicine, at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. He earned his BS from China Pharmaceutical University in Nanjing, China, in 2013, and his PhD from Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, in 2018. Prior to his current position, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the McAllister Heart Institute, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he contributed to research on transcriptional regulation in cardiac development.

The Shi Lab focuses on chromatin remodeling complexes and associated transcription factors that regulate embryonic heart development, cardiomyocyte maturation, and their roles in congenital heart diseases. Research employs transgenic mouse models with lineage tracing in cardiomyocytes and non-cardiomyocytes, as well as adeno-associated virus-mediated gene manipulation in neonatal mouse hearts to study trabeculation, compaction processes, and extracellular matrix proteins in early heart development. Dr. Shi received the Mary G. and George W. White Fund for Medical Research award of $55,000 for his proposal "Cardiomyocyte Immaturity as a Driver of Systemic Metabolic Dysfunction and Diabetes." His key publications include "TBX5 and CHD4 Coordinately Activate Atrial Cardiomyocyte Genes to Maintain Cardiac Rhythm Homeostasis" (Circulation, 2025), "X-Chromosome-Linked miRNAs Regulate Sex Differences in Cardiac Physiology" (Circulation Research, 2025), "Sex-specific response to A1BG loss results in female dilated cardiomyopathy" (Biology of Sex Differences, 2025), "CHD4 and SMYD1 repress common transcriptional programs in the developing heart" (Development, 2024), and "Missense Mutation in Human CHD4 Causes Ventricular Noncompaction by Repressing ADAMTS1" (Circulation Research, 2023). These works highlight his contributions to understanding gene regulatory networks and sex differences in cardiac function.