Michelle Yoon

Michelle was born and raised in Seoul, South Korea before she moved to New York City to attend high school. She received her bachelor’s degree from Princeton University, where she majored in molecular biology. At Princeton, she conducted research in Dr. Bonnie Bassler’s lab and wrote her senior thesis on quorum sensing-regulated gene expression patterns in bacterial biofilms. After graduating in 2023, she worked as a post-baccalaureate research associate in Dr. Bree Aldridge’s lab at Tufts University, where she characterized phenotypic responses to antibiotic combinations in Mycobacterium tuberculosis clinical isolates. She is currently a PhD student in Dr. Hualiang Pi’s lab at Yale, where she studies the biogenesis and functional diversification of bacterial ferrosome organelles using molecular, computational, and advanced imaging approaches. Outside of research, Michelle enjoys cooking, running, backpacking, and spending quality time with her cat Bronx.