Bio:

Yuanyuan joined the Allen Institute in 2024, where she studies how the evolution of cellular and gene regulatory programs relates to human brain function and disease. Her work is further informed by an interest in glial biology, through integrative analyses of multi-modal single-cell and spatial omics data.

Yuanyuan received her B.S. and M.S. degrees in Bioinformatics from Southeast University in Nanjing, China. During this time, she participated in a joint training program at BGI-Shenzhen, where she worked on de novo genome assembly, annotation, and resequencing analyses across plant and animal species. She then pursued her Ph.D. in Cell Biology at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, mentored by Dr. Fuchou Tang, where she studied human embryonic brain development, with an emphasis on astrocyte heterogeneity and lineage specification.