Hi! I’m starting my lab at UCLA Human Genetics in Spring 2020, and I’m recruiting students, postdocs and technicians.

Our favorite question is homologous recombination (HR). It is important for repairing double strand breaks (DSBs). HR is essential 1) for life: null mutations in BRCA genes are embryonic lethal; 2) in meiosis, which is initiated by hundreds of DSBs; and 3) in tumorigenesis.

The central vision of the lab is to build a fully probabilistic understanding of HR and resulting genome instability by developing genome-wide and highly multiplexed single-cell sequencing technologies. Initially, the lab will build on my experience in 1) studying fundamental DNA repair mechanisms, 2) statistical modeling, and 3) single-cell sequencing technology development to understand HR at three levels: cellular, whole-organism and tree-of-life (see Research for more details). We also anticipate that the highly scalable and generalizable single-cell assays developed here can be widely applicable to other interesting biological questions.

Biography

Dr. Yi Yin obtained a B.S. degree in Biotechnology from Beijing Normal University (BNU) in 2009. As an undergraduate, she worked in labs at BNU (cellular senescence, 2006-2007), National Institute of Biological Sciences (NIBS), Beijing (worm genetics, 2008) and Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory (TLL), Singapore (fly genetics, 2009). She then trained with Dr. Tom Petes at Duke University (University Program in Genetics and Genomics, 2009-2015) for her Ph.D. and studied mechanisms of mitotic recombination in yeast. Concurrently she also earned an M.S. degree in Statistical Science at Duke. She completed her postdoctoral training in Dr. Sunney Xie's lab at Harvard University (Chemistry and Chemical Biology, 2015-2016) and in Jay Shendure's lab at University of Washington (Genome Sciences, 2016-2020) on developing single-cell sequencing technologies. Dr. Yin has been offered an Assistant Professor position in March 2019 and will start in 2020.