Minji Byun

Assistant Professor, Microbiology & Molecular Genetics
School of Medicine

epigenetics, DNA methylation, stem cells, clonal hematopoiesis

Byun Lab

Minji Byun received her Bachelor's degree in Life Sciences from POSTECH, Korea, before relocating to the United States for graduate studies. She joined the Immunology Graduate Program at Washington University in St. Louis, where she conducted her doctoral research on novel immune evasion mechanisms of cowpox virus. After earning her Ph.D., she pursued postdoctoral training at Rockefeller University in New York City, where she identified and characterized rare human mutations underlying HHV8-driven Kaposi sarcoma and viral myocarditis. She then returned to Washington University in St. Louis as a faculty member before being recruited to the Precision Immunology Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in 2016. In 2022, she joined UCI as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics. Drawing on a broad background in immunology, human genetics, and epigenetics, her research group employs human pluripotent stem cells and their derivatives to investigate the pathogenic mechanisms of inborn and acquired mutations in epigenetic modifiers, in the context of growth syndromes and clonal hematopoiesis.

Cheon Y, Alvstad EG, Torre D, Quach DT, Nguyen J, Hyun K, Zhou M, Yu T, Liu L, Yoon Y, Reese F, Faraone L, Li Y, Arnold FJ, Fstkchyan YS, Basu U, Kvon E, Valente EM, Ho JSY, Byun M, Guccione E, Shi Y, Weng Z, Seldin M, Marazzi I. "Transposable element-gene chimera cartography, origination and role in enhancing transcriptome plasticity", Nat Struct Mol Biol. 2026 Feb 25. doi: 10.1038/s41594-026-01757-z.

Wheeler ME, Takahashi Y, Lee J, Perez C, Chen X, Lee Y, Pope ZS, Lu DJ, Seldin M, Marazzi I, Yun H, Weirauch MT, Byun M. “Convergent DNA methylation abnormalities at enhancers and bivalent chromatin in human growth disorders”, Epigenetics & Chromatin. 2025 Dec 27;19(1):8. doi: 10.1186/s13072-025-00650-1

Campisi L, Chizari S, Ho JSY, Gromova A, Arnold F, Mosca L, Mei X, Fstkchyan Y, Torre D, Beharry C, Garcia-Forn M, Jiménez-Alcázar M, Korobeynikov VA, Prazich J, Fayad ZA, Seldin MM, De Rubeis S, Bennett CL, Ostrow LW, Lunetta C, Squatrito M, Byun M, Shneider NA, Jiang N, La Spada AR, Marazzi I. “Clonally expanded CD8 T cells characterize amyotrophic lateral sclerosis-4“, Nature. 2022 Jun 22. doi: 10.1038/s41586-022-04844-5.

Lim J, Duttke S, Baker T, Lee J, Gambino K, Venturini N, Ho JSY, Zheng S, Fstkchyan Y, Pillai V, Fajgenbaum D, Marazzi I, Benner C, Byun M. “DNMT3A haploinsufficiency causes dichotomous DNA methylation defects at enhancers in mature human immune cells”, J Exp Med. 2021 Jul 5;218(7):e20202733. doi: 10.1084/jem.20202733.

Baker T, Gambino K, Schriefer L, Lim J, Steinberg KM, Fajgenbaum D, García-Sancho A, Byun M. “A novel FAS mutation with variable expressivity in a family with unicentric and idiopathic multicentric Castleman disease”, Blood Adv. 2018 Nov 13;2(21):2959-2963. doi: 10.1182/bloodadvances.2018023911.

Complete List of Published Work in My Bibliography: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/myncbi/minji.byun.1/bibliography/public/

Cellular and Molecular Biosciences

Mathematical, Computational and Systems Biology

Medical Scientist Training Program

Sue & Bill Gross Stem Cell Research Center

Center for Epigenetics and Metabolism

Institute for Immunology

Link to this profile
https://faculty.uci.edu/profile/?facultyId=7141

Last updated
03/09/2026