Cheng named Distinguished Professor

Keith Cheng, MD, Ph.D., has been named a Penn State University Distinguished Professor, in recognition of his academic contribution to Penn State. Cheng, a professor of pathology at Penn State College of Medicine, is a respected researcher in several fields of research, including genetic mechanisms that cause cancer, and basic mechanisms underlying the relationship between human skin pigmentation and cancer. 

Cheng received his B.A. from Harvard in 1976, medical degree from New York University School of Medicine in 1980, completing his anatomic pathology residency at Brigham & Women's Hospital, Boston; and University of Washington Hospitals, Seattle. He received his Ph.D. in molecular genetics in 1987 from University of Washington and was a postdoctoral fellow at University of Washington from 1987-1992.

Cheng joined Penn State Hershey in 1992 as an assistant professor of pathology. He is Jake Gittlen Cancer Research Foundation researcher.

Cheng is listed as an author on some 64 journal articles, including the December 16, 2005 cover story of Science for his use of zebrafish to discover a key gene involved in human skin color variation.   His lab found that a change in just one amino acid in one gene plays a major role in determining how people of European descent developed lighter skin than people of African descent.

The work in Cheng's laboratory is of unusual breadth and includes development of a web-based histology and 3D atlas (zfatlas.psu.edu). His most recent work includes a process to use the zebrafish to test the functional importance of individual changes in human genes, which contributes to the future of personalized medicine.

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