Charis Eng was a Singaporean American physician-scientist and geneticist at the Cleveland Clinic, notable for identifying the PTEN gene.
11 Facts About Charis Eng
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Charis Eng was the chairwoman and founding director of the Genomic Medicine Institute of the Cleveland Clinic, founding director and attending clinical cancer geneticist of the institute's clinical component, the Center for Personalized Genetic Healthcare, and professor and vice chairwoman of the Department of Genetics and Genome Sciences at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine.
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Charis Eng returned to the Farber as Assistant Professor of Medicine at the end of 1995, and in January 1999, joined The Ohio State University as Associate Professor of Medicine and Director of the Clinical Cancer Genetics Program.
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Charis Eng joined the Cleveland Clinic in 2005, and became the founding director of the Cleveland Clinic's Genomic Medicine Institute and the Center for Personalized Genetic Healthcare, and Professor and Vice Chair of the Department of Genetics and Genome Sciences at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine.
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Outside of the lab, Charis Eng acted as the primary genetics consultant to the Discovery Health Channel documentary "Curse of the Elephant Man", which traced the genetic causes of Joseph Merrick's disfiguring disorder.
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Charis Eng was involved in translational research focusing on hereditary cancer syndromes.
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Charis Eng was the first to discover a link between mutations in the cancer suppressor gene PTEN and Cowden syndrome, which predispose patients to several types of cancer, including breast, thyroid, uterine, and other cancers.
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From her research, Charis Eng led the development of clinical practice guidelines in cancer screening in patients with these mutations.
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Charis Eng was involved in discovering a link between PTEN and autism, one of the first associations between the latter condition and inherited cancer syndromes.
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Charis Eng was a wine enthusiast, a passion she developed during her post-doctoral research at the University of Cambridge.
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Charis Eng died in Cleveland on 13 August 2024, at the age of 62.