Who's Who in the Feng Lab

Group Leader

Xiaoqi Feng

Xiaoqi studied at the University of Oxford for her PhD and did a postdoc at the University of California, Berkley. She opened her lab at the John Innes Centre in mid-2014, and was awarded tenure in 2019. She received the prestigious David Phillips Fellowship (2014-2019) and the EMBO Young Investigator Award (2018-2022). She is grateful for funding and support from the John Innes Foundation, the BBSRC, the Gatsby Foundation and the ERC among others.

Postdocs

Shujuan Xu

Shujuan completed her PhD at Institute of Botany, the Chinese Academy of Sciences. She is trying to understand the mechanism underlying the condensation of sperm nuclei in Arabidopsis.

Students

Dulce Gomez Hernandez

PhD Student

Lab Alumni

• Shaoli Zhou is now a professor at Huazhong Agricultural University after investigating histone modification dynamics during germline development in the Feng Lab.
• Yalin Liu was a PostDoc working on the heat-sensitivity of the male germline, as well as Marchantia DNA methylation reprogramming.
• James Walker completed his Phd in the lab and he is now a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Ecker lab at SALK.
• Chris Morgan is an independent research fellow funded by the Discovery Fellowship. He is an expert on meiosis and super-resolution microscopy.
• Toby Buttress completed his Phd in the lab and is now Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Ahringer Group at the University of Cambridge.
• Sam Deans worked on improving how we understand large DNA methylation datasets for his PhD. He is a Data Scientist in the finance industry.
• Judit Talas completed her Phd in 2025. She is now a Bioinformatics Data Scientist at the Quadram Institute in Norwich.
• Martin Vickers was a PostDoc Bioinformatician in the lab. He is now a Senior Scientist in the Informatics platform at the JIC working on genomics, AI and Drone Phenomics. Website
• Jincheng Long joined the Feng Lab in late 2017. He has recently published a paper in Science on paternal epigenetic inheritance. He established a new lab at Institute of Plant Physiology and Ecology.
• Shengbo He completed his PhD at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. In 2019, He published a paper in eLife on H1 dynamics. He is now a Professor at South China Agricultural University.
• Jingyi Zhang was a postdoc in the lab. He is now an Assistant Professor at South China Agricultural University.
• Aileen Magilin was a Year in Industry student, taking a year out of her studies at Nottingham University to work in the lab, under the supervision of Toby Buttress
• Wenjing She joined us from a postdoc in Ueli Grossniklaus' lab in Zurich, where she worked on the epigenetics of the female germline and worked on various projects in the Feng lab. Wenjing is now an editor at Genome Biology.
• Billy Aldridge was the lab's first PhD student, completing his thesis in 2018. He developed a method for isolating tapetal cells by FACS with Jingyi Zhang. He now works in Whitehall as a civil servant.
• Hongbo Gao was a postdoc in the lab from its early days until 2018, and developed numerous cell isolation and sequencing library preparation protocols. He published as co-first author in Nature Genetics in 2018. He is now an Associate Professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Hongbo's homepage
• Viktoria Hristova was a summer student in 2019, working under the supervision of Toby Buttress. She is now an exchange student at the University of California.
• Dulce Hernandez was a visiting MSc student in the lab, from the lab of Dr Jean Phillipe Vielle Calzada at CINEVESTAV UGA-Langebio, Mexico
• Quetzeley Ortiz Vasquez was a visiting PhD student in the lab, also from the lab of Dr Jean Phillipe Vielle Calzada.
• Jiawen Chen is a Rotation PhD Student at the John Innes Centre, and undertook one of her rotations in the lab in 2019. Her thesis project is with Dr David Seung.
• Lira Palmer is a Rotation PhD Student at the John Innes Centre/Max Plank Institute for Chemical Ecology, Jena, and undertook one of her rotations in the lab in 2017. Her thesis project is with Professor Sarah O'Connor.
• Thomas Casey was a Year in Industry student in the lab, working with James Walker and Jingyi Zhang.
• Aaron Ang was a student on the JIC International Summer School in 2017. He is now a PhD student at the John Innes Centre, in Lars Østergaard's lab.
• Aisling Cooke recently completed a Rotation PhD at the John Innes Centre, and undertook one of her rotations in the lab in 2015. Her thesis project was with Dr Myriam Charpentier.