Dr. Weijie Guo won the gold medal in the National Biology Olympiad of China in 2013 and obtained direct entry to Peking University. He received his B.S. degree in Life Sciences from Peking University in 2018. During his undergraduate period, he was trained as a stem cell biologist in Dr. Hongkui Deng's lab and supervised by Dr. Chengyan Wang. He was recognized as an Outstanding Student Leader in Beijing for his contribution to the department Youth League Committee and won the President's Undergraduate Research Fellowship of Peking University. After graduation, he went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to pursue a Ph.D. degree and joined Dr. Yi Lu's lab in 2018. After the qualifying exam, he moved along with Dr. Lu to the University of Texas at Austin. He obtained his Ph.D. in Biochemistry in 2024 from UT Austin. His thesis work focused on non-genetic functions of DNAs, including DNAzymes, DNA aptamers, and functional DNAs in Neutrophil Extracellular Traps. 

Dr. Guo's research interests lie at the interface between chemical biology and cell biology. Specifically, he is eager to know the biological functions of non-coding nucleic acids and the development/application of functional DNA tools (Aptamers and DNAzymes) to investigate interesting biological events.