Yayan Feng, PhD

Yayan joined the lab in June 2024 as a postdoctoral fellow after a two-year postdoctoral training at Cleveland Clinic. She finished her PhD from Agricultural Genomics Institute at Shenzhen (AGIS), Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS) in July 2021 with a major in biochemistry & molecular biology. In her PhD, she focused on roles of epigenetic mechanisms, such as DNA methylation, during disease onset and progression. During this process, she developed a strong passion for the crosstalk between genome and epigenome in human health and disease. After graduation, she found her first postdoc fellowship in Cleveland Clinic, uncovering the basic genetic and epigenetic control of transposon activation in human Alzheimer’s disease brains. She revealed novel transposon activation mechanisms and provided potential transposon-targeted therapies for preserving brain health in aging and Alzheimer’s disease. In the Lee lab, Yayan will further develop and apply new computational methods to study the roles of transposons in human health and diseases.