The endowed Yen Fellows Program has been established to attract postdoctoral level researchers who will be associated with one or more IBD faculty but have the freedom to conduct research independently. This program is supported by the endowment of a gift from U of C Chemistry Department alumnus Yung-Tsai Yen, PhD ’75, and his wife Ho-Tzu.
The Institute invites applications for the Institute’s endowed Yen Fellowship. This fellowship is for recent and upcoming Ph.D. graduates and seeks to support outstanding individuals to pursue cutting edge research at the interfaces of the Biological Sciences, Physical Sciences, and Molecular Engineering. The Yen Fellows are a community of driven postdoctoral researchers who have defined unique research directions in collaboration with one or more faculty members. The Fellowship provides partial salary support for two years in addition to providing an independent research budget. To apply, please send a two page research proposal, a curriculum vitae, and three reference letters to Candice Lewis. The application deadline is November 1, 2022.
Yen fellows can be mentored by any member of the IBD faculty. The faculty members who are actively seeking postdocs this year are:
Aaron Dinner, Allan Drummond, Jingyi Fei, Michael Glotzer, Andrew Koh, Chuan He, David Kovar, Stephen Kron, Jason MacLean, Peter Maurer, Edwin Munro, Arvind Murugan, David Pincus, Eduardo Perozo, Phoebe Rice, Michael Rust, Allison Squires, Andrei Tokmakoff, Suri Vaikuntanathan, Greg Voth, Minglei Zhao
A complete list of the Institute faculty and their research interests can be found here. We encourage applicants to contact Institute faculty directly about potential projects.
Shailaja Seetharaman
2021 Yen Fellow
My research aims to understand subcellular dynamics that control tissue organization and functioning, in physiological and pathological conditions. In particular, I am interested in deciphering the cytoskeletal crosstalk mechanisms that contribute to cell adhesion, migration and mechanotransduction in normal tissues, and how alterations in these cellular processes can drive disease progression. During my postdoctoral work in Margaret Gardel’s Lab, I am investigating how the LIM domain family of proteins sense and adapt to mechanical stresses to trigger specific downstream mechanotransduction pathways. optogenetics, and organoid cultures. In my postdoctoral research, I will leverage this expertise towards understanding the role of LIM domain proteins in mechanotransduction.
Bei Liu
2021 Yen Fellow
Bei Liu is a postdoctoral researcher working in Dr. Chuan He’s lab in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on understanding the biological functions of epitranscriptomic modifications. He graduated from Duke University where he worked on investigating the impact of chemical modifications on RNA structure and dynamics. He is interested in developing methods to manipulate RNA structure and activity in cells.
Riccardo Ravasio
2020 Yen Fellow
Riccardo is a postdoc in Arvind Murugan and Rama Ranganathan’s groups since July 2021. He is interested in the connection between structure, function and evolution in biology both at the microbial and protein level. Prior to this, Riccardo pursued his PhD at EPFL in Lausanne under the supervision of Matthieu Wyart. He worked on understanding the physical principles behind the emergence of long-range functional response in elastic material as a proxy to understand allostery in proteins. He also worked with inference models to predict allosteric function from sequence data.
Kabir Husain
2021 Yen Fellow
Kabir is a postdoc in Arvind Murugan’s group. Trained as a physicist, he is interested in how the physical architecture of biology constrains evolution. Prior to this, he did his PhD in cellular signalling and active matter with Madan Rao and Jitu Mayor at the NCBS in Bangalore, India. His work involves tools from statistical physics, information theory, and more recently experimental approaches in molecular biology and laboratory evolution.