UTHealth Houston Recruits Circadian Liver Researcher Dongyin Guan, PhD
The Institute of Perioperative Medicine and the Department of Anesthesiology, Critical Care and Pain Medicine at McGovern Medical School have recruited Dongyin Guan, PhD, as an Associate Professor. His recruitment is supported by a $400,000 UT System Faculty STARs Award for laboratory equipment and renovations.
Dr. Guan joins UTHealth Houston from Baylor College of Medicine, where he was a CPRIT Scholar and Assistant Professor of Medicine. His laboratory investigates how diet and genetic variation reshape the liver’s 24-hour circadian clock, and how these changes contribute to fatty liver disease and liver cancer.
Dr. Guan’s work in circadian liver biology began with Dr. Mitchell Lazar at the University of Pennsylvania. He demonstrated that a high-fat diet remodels liver enhancers through non-canonical clock regulators such as SREBP1 and PPARα (Cell, 2018), and that the hepatocyte clock and meal timing together coordinate daily programs across liver cell types (Science, 2020). More recent work from his group has linked human genetic variation to rhythmic gene expression (Nature Communications, 2025) and genetics–nutrition interactions to enhancer–promoter communication and lipid metabolism (Cell Metabolism, 2025).
Dr. Guan currently holds an NCI R37 MERIT Award investigating ESRRγ-mediated circadian enhancer–promoter interactions in the progression from fatty liver disease to hepatocellular carcinoma.
His research aligns closely with IPM’s mission to understand and prevent perioperative organ injury. Surgery, anesthesia, fasting, and altered hospital schedules can disrupt circadian rhythms, especially in patients with metabolic and fatty liver disease. Understanding how time-of-day biology influences liver injury and recovery may ultimately help identify when therapeutic interventions and nutritional strategies can be most effective.
Please join us in welcoming Dr. Dongyin Guan to UTHealth Houston!