Hui Yang

I am interested in neural control of innate behavioral drives, with a focus on acute hunger, satiety, and energy homeostasis. Clinically, this pertains most directly to eating disorders, and more broadly to aberrant reward perception and ultimately entrenchment of counter-survival behaviors. My interest stemmed from a background as a track athlete and later an amateur physique athlete. Come and lift heavy with me in the gym!

I came to the U.S. from China at the age of 18 to pursue my undergraduate education. I got my first biomedical research experience at Johns Hopkins Wilmer Eye Institute, where I studied retina development and degeneration in Dr. Valeria Canto-Soler’s lab. After college, I spent two years in Durban, South Africa and conducted research on bacterial molecular genetics and DNA topology. I lived in a hostel and shared happiness and sorrow with vibrant local university students, hardworking Zulu women who came into the city for better job opportunities, and an adorable landlord gentleman of Dutch descent.

I then returned to the U.S. for the MD PhD training. I completed my PhD in Dr. Scott Sternson’s lab at HHMI Janelia Research Campus. We were interested in coding of need states and need-fulfilling processes by subregions of the hypothalamus. My colleague Dr. Shengjin Xu and I developed a new research platform that allowed all the sufficiently refined cell types and all behaviors of interest to be studied in the same animal. We were thereby able to make discoveries unattainable by previously existing methods.

At Yale, I have joined Dr. Ruslan Medzhitov’s lab. My project focuses on the gut-brain sensing of essential nutrients that we humans do not seem to report specific “craving” for. The imbalance and rebalance of these nutrients track the trajectory of anorexia illness and recovery. I am passionate about connecting this work to clinical care and making eating disorder care at all acuity levels more accessible to patients of all ages and background.