Alice Ting

Biosketch

Alice Y. Ting, PhD is Professor of Genetics, Biology and, by courtesy, Chemistry, at Stanford University. She earned her AB in Chemistry from Harvard University and her PhD in Chemistry from University of California Berkeley. She was a postdoctoral fellow in biochemistry at University of California San Diego. Ting joined MIT’s Chemistry Department as a faculty member in 2002, and relocated to Stanford in 2016. She is a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub – San Francisco Investigator. Awards and honors include the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, ACS Arthur Cope Scholar Award, McKnight Technological Innovations in Neuroscience Award, and Eli Lilly Award in Biological Chemistry, TR35 Award, and Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award.

Research Interests

Ting focuses on developing molecular technologies for studying and manipulating biochemical events in living cells. Her pioneering work in proximity labeling, using engineered enzymes like APEX and TurboID, allows scientists to map spatial proteomes, transcriptomes, and interactomes with nanometer precision. They have successfully applied this method to map the proteomes of membraneless organelles, dissect transient protein complexes, and create a spatial map of the human transcriptome. Additionally, Ting has developed scalable, single-cell molecular recording technologies, including calcium integrators and transcriptional recorders of protein-protein interactions, leading to discoveries such as a new striatal cell type involved in avoidance behavior. Ting’s contributions also include fluorophore ligases, monovalent streptavidin, small monovalent quantum dots, and genetically-encoded protein tags for electron microscopy.