Keynote Speaker

Yuan He

Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Structural Biophysics and Chromatin Biology
Thomas C. Jenkins Department of Biophysics
Johns Hopkins University

Biography

Yuan He received his PhD in Biochemistry and Biophysics from Northwestern University, where he worked in the laboratory of Ishwar Radhakrishnan, utilizing NMR spectroscopy to study endocytosis and transcriptional repressive complexes. He then continued his research in structural biology, employing cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) as a post-doctoral fellow with Eva Nogales at the University of California, Berkeley, to reveal the architecture of the human transcription pre-initiation complex and uncover mechanistic details of how transcription starts at promoters.  

In 2015, Dr. He returned to Northwestern University to establish his independent lab, focusing on the molecular mechanisms by which large, multi-subunit complexes engage in DNA-centric processes. In 2024, Dr. He joined Johns Hopkins University with appointments in the Department of Biophysics and the Department of Biology to further his research on the structure and mechanism of how cells read, write, and repair the genome. Dr. He was awarded the Burton Medal from the Microscopy Society of America.