The long-term goal of Dr. Pan's laboratory is to understand the underlying molecular mechanisms by which environmental factors influence the risk of diseases, in order that effective interventions can be developed to reduce the incidence of the disease. His lab utilizes a variety of models of human developmental diseases, including obesity, diabetes, and cancer. His lab uses experimental, statistical, and computational analyses to explore the epigenome, to integrate comparative and high-throughput epigenomics data. His lab also uses a wide range of molecular biology techniques including analysis of chromatin structure, promoter analysis, gene delivery, quantitative real-time PCR, sequencing analysis and bioluminescent Imaging.