Jing Yan, PhD

Jing Yan is currently an Assistant Professor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology and a member of the Quantitative Biology Institute (Qbio) at Yale. Originally from Shanghai, China, he obtained his B.S. degree from the College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering at Peking University in China, with extensive undergraduate research experience in organic synthesis. In 2009, he switched to the field of soft matter physics and pursued Ph.D. degree in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 2014, he stumbled into microbiology at Princeton as a joint postdoctoral researcher in the department of Molecular Biology and Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.

in 2019, he started his independent lab at Yale. His lab focuses on bacterial biofilms, surface-attached communities of bacteria surrounded by an extracellular matrix. His lab combines state-of-art imaging techniques, biochemical tools, genetics, mechanical measurements, and computer simulations to understand how bacteria build multicellular communities cell by cell, what unique materials they use to do so, and what characteristics emerge at the level of the collective. Ultimately, the lab aims to solve biofilm-related problems in medicine and in industry and to enhance the use of beneficial biofilms. Jing received the Career Award at the Scientific Interface from Burroughs Wellcome Fund (BWF) in 2016, NIH Director’s New Innovator Award in 2021, Sloan Research Fellowship in 2023, and Investigator in Pathogenicity from BWF in 2023.