Songtao earned his Ph.D. from the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California, Los Angeles, where he worked with Dr. Albert Courey studying transcription regulation during Drosophila embryo development. Afterward, he conducted postodoctoral work with Dr. Shiv Grewal, first at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories and then at the National Cancer Institute, where he studied the mechanisms of gene silencing in fission yeast.
Currently, Songtao is a Professor at the Department of Biological Sciences, Columbia University, and a member of the Cancer Genomics and Epigenomics Program at the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center, Columbia University Irving Medical Center. His lab investigates the basic mechanisms of epigenetic inheritance and how their misregulation contributes to human diseases.
Songtao currently teaches The Central Dogma: Mechanisms and Regulations (BIOL GR6007), Seminar in Epigenetics (BIOL GU4035), and Biotechnology (GU4034) and has also taught Molecular Biology (BIOL GU4512) from 2008 to 2020.
Along with Dr. Lars Dietrich, Songtao is a co-Director of Graduate studies, overseeing the Biological Sciences Ph.D. program.