Dr. Wolfe has extensive research and management experience in the biotech industry and has a special interest in drug discovery and interdisciplinary research in chemistry and biology. She currently directs a drug discovery group within the Center for Computational and Integrative Biology.

Dr. Wolfe started her career in biotech industry as a research scientist at Hybridon, Inc., where she developed chemically-modified antisense oligonucleotides and ribozymes as potential therapeutic agents. After moving to a fledging pharmacogenomics company, Variagenics, Inc., she quickly advanced from Senior Scientist to Director of Chemistry and eventually became Senior Director of Research. She successfully developed high-throughput technologies on a mass spectrometry platform for SNP genotyping of DNA generated using novel nucleotide analogs. She also directed the development of whole genome amplification methods to enable prospective and retrospective genotype/haplotype analysis on minute quantities of fresh and preserved clinical samples. Dr. Wolfe has published many peer-reviewed research articles in prestigious chemistry and biology journals, and is an inventor of more than ten issued US patents.

An honors graduate of University of Science and Technology of China, Jia received broad training there, including chemistry, mathematics, physics, and statistics. She entered a graduate chemistry program at the State University of New York at Stony Brook as a prospective Physical Chemistry student and obtained a PhD in Organic Chemistry in 1990. Her training under Professor Thomas W. Bell, a synthetic chemist with expertise in making elegant and functional bio-mimetic molecules, piqued her interest in the life sciences. Dr. Wolfe’s interdisciplinary expertise was further developed during her postdoctoral work at Harvard University with Professor Gregory Verdine, a leader in the field of chemical biology working at the interface of chemistry, molecular biology, and structural biology.