Biography
Dr. Yifan (Yi-Fan) Yang, born in 1984 in Wuhan, Hubei. He completed his undergraduate studies at Yuanpei College of Peking University, where he studied both mathematics and life sciences, earning a bachelor's degree in life sciences in 2008. In 2011 and 2016, he obtained his master's and doctoral degrees from the University of Paris (Paris V) in France. In 2019, he began his postdoctoral research at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel under the mentorship of Uri Alon. He is expected to join Westlake University in January 2025 as a principal investigator, with research interests focused on nonlinear dynamics in biological aging, statistical physics, and quantitative physiology.
Research
When studying aging, traditional molecular genetics and cell biology approaches face challenges such as complexity, randomness, and emergence. Although many biological processes related to aging have been identified as the hallmarks of aging, it is still unclear how their interactions specifically lead to individual aging and determine lifespan.
Dr. Yang's current work shows that under the mean fieldapproximation,low-dimensional stochastic differential equations can universally describe the aging process of various model organisms, ranging fromE. colito mice.Wecombine experimental and theoretical approaches to understand the first principles that lead to biological aging. At the same time, the group plans to leverage developed quantitative tools to explore the biological mechanisms and causal relationships of aging in mammals, constructing falsifiable theoretical predictions to provide guidance for the emerging field of aging research. The group's work will focus on the following topics:
1.The dynamics and statistical physics of biological aging and failures of complex, interconnected networks;
2.The quantitative physiology of cellular stress responses;
3.The computational genetics and omics of mammalian aging and tissue homeostasis.
Representative Publications (*Corresponding authors)
1.Yang Y, Mayo A, Levy T, Jarosz D, Alon U*.Compression of sickspan by interventions that steepen the survival curve. BioRxiv (2023 in revision forNat. Commun) doi:10.1101/2023.10.04.560871.
2.Yang Y*, Karin O, Mayo A, Song X, Chen P, Santos A, Lindner AB, Alon U*. Damage dynamics and the role of chance in the timing ofE. colicell death.Nat. Commun.14.1 (2023): 2209.
3.Yang Y*, Santos AL, Xu L, Lotton C, Taddei F, Lindner AB*. Temporal scaling of aging as an adaptive strategy of Escherichia coli.Science Advances(2019) May 29;5:eaaw2069S.
4.Yang Y, Song X, Lindner AB*.Time-lapse microscopy and image analysis of Escherichia coli cells in mother machines.Methods in Microbiology, (2016) Dec 1;43:49-68.
5.Izard J, Gomez Balderas CD, Ropers D, Lacour S, Song X,Yang Y, Lindner AB, Geiselmann J, de Jong H. A synthetic growth switch based on controlled expression of RNA polymerase.Mol. Syst. Biol.(2015) Nov 23;11(11):840.
Contact Us
Email：yangyifan@westlake.edu.cn
