Yuan Zhu

Yuan is a Senior Principal Scientist at Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, working on clinical exploratory biomarkers in the Oncological space. After graduating from the Petrov Lab, Yuan was a Research Fellow (equivalent of a Postdoctoral Fellow) in the lab of Swaine Chen at the Genome Institute of Singapore. She is applying population genetics and genomic methods to pathogenic bacterial populations, such as pathogenic E. Coli strains responsible for human UTIs (urinary tract infections). While in the Petrov lab (2008-2013) Yuan focused on the application of next-generation sequencing to answering a broad range of questions in genomic evolution, population structure, and population evolution. She showed that pooled re-sequencing is a remarkably efficient and precise tool for the estimation of allele frequencies in a population PLOS One 2012. She also characterized the genome-wide mutation spectrum of lab yeast with ~1000 mutations from a large scale mutation accumulation experiment, noting that mutations are AT biased and context dependent, with evidence suggesting possible methylation in yeast PNAS 2014. She was also studying the population structure of clinical yeast strains, as well as the possibility of extracting young mutations and the mutation spectrum from deep population sequencing data. Yuan did her undergraduate work at Duke with Susan Alberts, looking at father-daughter behavioral patterns in baboons.