Yuyun Zhang

Yuyun Zhang is a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Dr. Xinshu Grace Xiao at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she investigates the regulatory roles of transposable elements in Alzheimer’s disease and neurodegeneration. She received her Ph.D. in Bioinformatics and functional epigenomics from University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, where she developed expertise in transposable element biology and computational epigenomics in polyploid plant genomes, producing first-author publications in Genome Research, Nature Communications, and The Plant Cell. Her current research integrates large-scale transcriptomic and genomic datasets to characterize how TE-derived exons influence gene regulation and contribute to disease pathogenesis. She has particular experience in alternative splicing analysis, QTL mapping, and the computational processing of long-read and short-read RNA sequencing data. Dr. Zhang is committed to bridging computational discovery with experimental validation. Her goal is to uncover novel molecular mechanisms in Alzheimer’s disease that may ultimately inform the development of RNA-targeted therapeutics and disease biomarkers.