About

Before moving to Houston, Yixuan (pronounced Yi-Shwin) earned a B.A. (2018) in Biology and Mathematics at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH. She then moved to Boston to pursue her PhD in Bioinformatics and Integrative Genomics at Harvard Medical School in Dr. Chirag Patel’s group. During graduate school, Yixuan developed statistical methods and computational tools to parse through high-dimensional environmental exposure data and electronic health care data to predict and stratify the risk of type 2 diabetes and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

After receiving her PhD (2022), she pursued her post-doctoral training with Dr. Alicia Martin with co-mentorship from Dr. Alexander Gusev and Dr. Jordan Smoller. During her two years of training at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, she developed a new polygenic risk scores approach which incorporated the genetic information of multiple traits across multiple ancestry groups. She was, and continues to, be particularly interested in understanding the distinct and shared genetic architecture between lung diseases as well as between psychiatric diseases. For a more formal account of Yixuan’s academic work, please see her CV.

Yixuan is now an Assistant Professor in the Human Genetics Center and Department of Epidemiology, Human Genetics, and Environmental Sciences at UTHealth SPH. In her free time, Yixuan enjoys baking, painting, and spending time with her dog, Mido.