Seminar – Gene Yeo, PhD, MBA – “Understanding and Manipulating Protein-RNA Interactions in Human Neurological Diseases”

Gene Yeo, PhD, MBA
University of California, San Diego

About the Speaker: Dr. Gene Yeo is an expert in the areas of RNA, computational biology, genomics and neurological diseases. Yeo obtained a bachelor of science in chemical engineering and a bachelor of arts in economics from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (1998) and a master’s degree in business administration from the Rady School of Management at the University of California, San Diego (2008). Funded by the Lee Kuan Yew Graduate Fellowship from Singapore, Yeo earned a Ph.D. in computational neuroscience (2005) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the joint guidance of Dr. Tomaso Poggio and Dr. Christopher Burge. Using comparative genomics and statistical learning theory Yeo pioneered new computational approaches to attack the problem of splicing and splicing-mediated gene regulation. In 2005 Yeo was appointed the first Junior Fellow at the Crick-Jacobs Center for Theoretical and Computational Biology at the Salk Institute under the mentorship of Dr. Fred Gage and Dr. Sean Eddy. Yeo’s collaborative nature has generated successful projects and grants with experts in neuroscience and neurodegeneration (Dr. Fred Gage and Dr. Don Cleveland), RNA processing (Nobel Laureate Dr. Phillip Sharp, Dr. Manuel Ares, Jr, Dr. Brenton Graveley, Dr. Xiangdong Fu and Dr. Amy Pasquinelli) and virology (Dr. Deborah Spector). In late 2008, Yeo was appointed an assistant professor in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at UCSD. In 2011, Yeo was awarded the Alfred P Sloan Fellowship in recognition of his work in computational molecular biology. In 2014, Yeo was promoted with tenure to associate professor at UCSD. In 2016, Yeo was accelerated to full professor. Since 2003, Yeo has authored over 100 peer-reviewed publications, invited book chapters, review articles in the areas of neurodegeneration, RNA processing, computational biology and stem cell models and served as editor on several books on RNA binding proteins. In 2017, Yeo was awarded the inaugural Early Career award by the international RNA Society. Yeo has successfully authored 4 and co-authored 2 grants from the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine totaling $8.5 million. Yeo has served as principal investigator (PI) or co-PI on several NIH R01, U19 and U54 grants. The ALS Association, Takeda, Genentech and Roche Pharmaceuticals funded Yeo’s work. Yeo is on the scientific advisory boards of several biotech companies, actively serves as a bioinformatics and business consultant to biotech and pharmaceutical companies, and is a co-founder at start-ups Enzerna, Eclipsebio, ProteoNA and Locana. Yeo is on the editorial board of the journals Cell Reports and Cell Research. Yeo is a visiting professor at the National University of Singapore, an Adjunct Senior Research Scientist at the Genome Institute of Singapore and a visiting researcher at the Molecular Engineering Laboratory under Nobel Laureate Sydney Brenner’s auspices. Yeo was a Sword of Honor recipient (the highest honor) in Officer Cadet School in 1999 and has served in the Singapore Navy as a Naval officer. Yeo has completed 2 full Ironman-distance and multiple half-ironman-, olympic-, sprint-distance triathlons, full marathons and half-marathons.

For Further Information: Contact Teresa Palumbo at 608.263.5837 or palumbo@waisman.wisc.edu

The seminar series is funded by the John D. Wiley Conference Center Fund, the Friends of the Waisman Center and NIH grant U54 HD090256.