The Yu lab opened in January 2025 at the Baylor College of Medicine within the Therapeutic Innovation Center (THINC) and the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology. Our mission is to better understand dynamical RNA regulation in human health applications and develop therapeutics based on this knowledge. To achieve our goals, we will leverage techniques spanning artificial intelligence (AI), computational biology, bioinformatics, and synthetic biology.

Professor Angela M Yu is a tenure-track Assistant Professor and has spent her entire research career in RNA computational biology. She was a Washington Research Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow during her time at the University of Washington working with Professor Georg Seelig. Her postdoctoral work used massively parallel reporter assays (MPRAs) and machine learning (ML) to understand sequence and drug-mediated effects on RNA regulation. Professor Yu has a PhD from the Tri-Institutional Training Program in Computational Biology and Medicine where she was advised by Professor Julius B. Lucks and led the development of computational methods for reconstructing RNA folding pathways from data (featured in the NIH Director’s Blog). Her passion for RNA biology started during her undergraduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania where she obtained a BAS in Computational Biology from the Department of Computer Science with a minor in Mathematics. She engaged in transcriptomics research in Professor Brian D. Gregory’s lab as well as within the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Through a summer research experience at Oxford University in 2013, she started researching cotranscriptional RNA structure which is a major research interest to this day.