What are the regulatory mechanisms that control homeostatic turnover, and how do their perturbation contribute to disease progression? The lung is a very slow cycling organ that is composed of diverse epithelial and stromal cell types, but has capacity to rapidly regenerate new cells after injury. Lee group is trying to understand how stem cells respond to different signals from their local environment and orchestrate the changes in chromatin, transcription, translation, and cellular dynamics in homeostasis and injury repair. We investigate the regulatory networks that need to be turned on and off at the right time and place for stem cells to become activated and generate specialised cell types during regeneration. We are also interested in defining cellular heterogeneity and plasticity during this process. Elucidating the normal process of lung dynamics will provide us a foundation to understand lung diseases and cancer. We couple ex vivo 3D organoid cultures of human and mouse lungs with genetic tools, in vivo transgenic mouse models with lineage tracing techniques, quantitative mathematic modelling of clonal dynamics, and bioinformatics at the single cell level.