Student Profiles

Yifan graduated from the University of Wisconsin Madison in 2014 with a B.S. in biology and psychology. He firstly developed an interest in science he shadowed in Dr. Stephen Ekker’s Lab at the Mayo Clinic. He worked on validating a transposon-based gene screening tool in zebrafish to study stress response. Yifan continued his research career throughout college at Dr. Craig Kent’s vascular surgery Lab studying restenosis. His effort resulted in the development of a novel perivascular sheath drug delivery system for restenosis patients, as well as the advancement in the understanding of TGF-Smad3-mediated pathogenesis in restenosis. He also worked at Dr. Paul Sondel’s immunotherapy Lab evaluating the efficacy of the cytokine-conjugated antibody therapy in pediatric neuroblastoma patients. After graduation, Yifan joined Dr. Karen Usdin’s Lab at the NIDDK as a postbac fellow studying the genetic pathogenesis process of Fragile X Syndrome (FXS). His work demonstrated a potential selective advantage of the FXS-patient-derived stem cells with methylated Fragile X Mental Retardation Gene 1, which could explain the transgenerational anticipation occurring in FXS families. Furthermore, he also developed a cost-effective semi-quantitative methylation assay that could be applied in prenatal genetic testing for FXS. He published these results in two first-author manuscripts. Most recently, Yifan completed a master’s degree in Immunology at the University of Oxford. he has been studying multiple sclerosis animal models and developing blood biomarkers using NMR-based metabolomics.  As a NIH OxCam scholar, Yifan plans to investigate haematopoiesis using single cell analysis platform at transcriptome and epigenome levels.