Simon N. Chu MD, MS is a General Surgery Resident in the UCSF Department of Surgery. He attended his undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley in the fields of Public Health and Health and Medical Sciences. He completed his medical degree at UCSF in the UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program and Program in Medicine for the Urban Underserved and was inducted into the Alpha Omega Alpha society. During his graduate and medical training, he conducted basic science research in virology and immunology, completing a Master's Degree and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Fellowship. He is currently a resident research fellow in the Mackenzie lab studying maternal-fetal tolerance in patients with alpha-thalassemia major who underwent an in-utero stem cell transplant. He is also participating in investigations of novel gene therapies to treat congenital diseases before birth using various genome editing strategies.

Specifically, his current work investigates whether the fetal immune system is responsive against maternal alloantigens after a maternal in utero stem cell transplant. Using an in vitro mixed lymphocyte reaction, proliferative responses in CD4+ and CD8+ fetal T cells are measured after exposure to maternal antigen-presenting cells. In addition to examining alloreactive responses, he is also pursuing high-throughput single cell sequencing to explore the T-cell receptor repertoire in the developing fetal immune system after IUSCT.