MegaRobo Engineering Grants and Awards The New Power in Life Sciences Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-Financed Students Abroad Fred Wedler Outstanding Dissertation Award Paul Berg Prize in Molecular Biology

Research in my laboratory focuses on bioactive natural products, which intend to serve as both the inspiration for the discovery of novel synthetic strategies and a chemical starting point for the discovery of novel therapeutics.

We are interested in the structure, function and regulation of our genome, especially the transposable elements. Transposable elements, also called mobile DNA elements or transposons, comprise nearly half of the human genome, and are still able to mobilize in modern humans. Transposons can affect neural and embryonic development, and are related with over 100 different types of diseases, including cancers and neurological disorders. However, the detailed mechanism and functions of transposons remain largely unexplored. Through ‘wet lab’ and ‘dry lab’ techniques, we are studying the mechanism of transposon regulation and the roles of transposons in development and disease.

Dr. Yanyan Lan has an excellent academic record. Her research fields are information retrieval and machine learning. During her time at Institute of Computing Technology, CAS, she headed the Department of Data Science, Key Lab of Network Data Science and Technology, and led the team in fundamental research information retrieval theories, computing paradigms, and interactive mechanisms. Her team’s research went beyond the basic theoretical hypothesis of information retrieval, built the Learning to Rank theory, and came up with a framework for relation-based Learning to Rank and a computing model for deep matching, which shifted information retrieval from a static ranking of results to a dynamic generation of information, greatly improving the utility of information retrieval.