As a Schmidt Science Fellow, Yining plans to uncover why cancer vaccine responses differ between young and older individuals to help design more effective, personalized cancer vaccines for aging and immunocompromised populations.
Yining will explore how aging alters immune responses to mRNA-based cancer vaccines, which use lipid nanoparticles to deliver genetic instructions.
By integrating spatial omics with machine learning and combining them with advanced tissue imaging to map immune cells and in situ vaccination, Yining aims to evaluate how hundreds of vaccine formulations perform in living animals and guide the design of more effective, personalized cancer vaccines for aging and immunocompromised populations.
Yining will pivot from Biomedical Engineering to Systems Biology