Alice Y. Cheung

Biosketch

Alice Y. Cheung is a Distinguished Professor in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She earned a BA in Biochemistry from Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, and a Ph.D. in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale University, studying tRNAs and aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases. She did her postdoctoral research in chloroplast molecular biology at Harvard University. She joined the Biology Department at Yale University. During her early faculty years, she started a research program in flowering plant reproduction. She later moved back to the Northampton/Amherst area with her husband, a graduate school classmate and long-time collaborator, Hen-Ming Wu to the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. She serviced her research community as leader of an NSF-supported Research Coordination Network focused on broadening participation in the field of pollen and plant reproduction biology, a long-time editor for the flagship journal of the American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB), and long-time member of the Scientific Advisory Board for the Institute of Plant and Microbial Institute of the Academia Sinica in Taiwan. She is a fellow of ASPB, a fellow of the American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB), a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a recipient of the Lawrence Bogorad Award for Excellence in Plant Biology from ASPB.

Research Interests

Research in the Cheung and Wu laboratory focuses on understanding the fundamental mechanisms that underlie reproductive success in flowering plants, in particular interactions between pollen and the female organ, the pistil, that support pollination and enable fertilization. Starting with an early interest in studying female tissue-produced molecules, her lab moved on to pioneer early live-cell studies in elongating pollen tubes and elucidated critical mechanistic linkages between the pollen tube response system, the underlying actin and vesicular events that orchestrate the polarized cell growth process. Their lab's more recent research returned to her original interest in how the pistil regulates the pollination process. They discovered several related receptor kinase-GPI-anchored protein coreceptors, regulated by pistil and pollen ligands, as regulators of several key male-female interactive steps that enable fertilization. Paralleling the studies in reproduction, the Cheung and Wu lab is also devoted to uncovering a deeper understanding of fundamental signal transduction mechanisms in plants. Among these works, their lab discovered the involvement of RHO GTPases in auxin signaling, a role for a GPI-anchored protein as a chaperone to transport its coreceptor receptor kinase to membrane microdomains, and an extracellular liquid-liquid phase separation process that enables a broadly functional cell surface regulatory mechanism and facilitates plant resilience. These works together build foundations towards improving plant properties important for agricultural productivity.