My research career has dedicated to the identification of the molecular mechanisms regulating cardiac lineage commitment during embryonic development and the biology of cardiac progenitor cells in development and disease. We believe that by understanding the transcriptional and epigenetic basis of cardiac growth and differentiation, we can identify the most effective ways to repair diseased neonatal and adult hearts. We employ mouse and human embryonic and induced pluripotent stem cells as well as rodents as our in vivo models for investigation. Our work have led to the identification of a bi-poten cardiac progenitor cell in the fetal mammalian heart and the role of yin yang 1 as a master regulator of mesodermal commitment into cardiac lineage. We have also uncovered a robust compensatory response in the early fetal heart towards cell loss and the role of IGF signaling to expand the number of cardiac progenitor cells. More recently, we have examined the transcriptional signature of single cardiac cells from the mouse embryos and embryonic stem cells and have developed a way to anatomically localize the spatial position of single cardiomyocyte using single cell RNA sequencing data.