Yingzhi Ye
Yingzhi Ye earned the Toffler Scholar Award in 2023 at Johns Hopkins University
Biography
Yingzhi Ye was born in Hangzhou, China, located in the Zhejiang province. Hangzhou is noted globally for its contributions to science. Ye is proud to be from Hangzhou and on her own journey to make a mark on the world through science.
Ye’s mother and father are both graduates of Zhejiang University. Her mother holds a degree in education and worked in administration. Her father holds a degree in biomedical engineering and became a professor.
Ye was drawn to Chinese and English in school, then became interested in the sciences when she entered junior high school. She favored chemistry and bioscience. Ye credits two supportive teachers for this passion. Ye’s dad also played a role in her scientific leanings, teaching her about the research process and occasionally taking her to work with him. Ye loved interacting with her father’s students and watching them learn. When not studying, Ye enjoyed playing sports.
Ye worked hard to be competitive and was accepted into an excellent high school. But after graduation, she was unsure of her future career plans. She had no idea what major she wanted to choose. She chose to attend her parents’ alma mater, Zhejiang University, hoping to find a career path.
During her freshman year, she found inspiration in her clinical classes, where she observed clinicians working at patients’ bedsides. Ye noted the needs and struggles of those hospital patients.
She also worked as an undergraduate researcher in a lab studying autism, which inspired her interest in neuroscience and the brain. Ye briefly considered becoming a doctor. Many of her peers were taking that route. But they told Ye that while they can work to treat and cure patients, they also know there is still much to learn about diseases. “We need basic science to discover cures,” they told her.
In Ye’s fourth year of college, she took an internship in a lab at Harvard University. She connected with the lab’s principal investigator when he taught and collaborated at Zhejiang University. A year later, she applied and was accepted to Johns Hopkins University.
Today, Ye is a Ph.D. candidate in her fourth year at Johns Hopkins. She is studying Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, also known as ALS, in the Department of Physiology’s Sun Laboratory.
“There are a lot of neurodevelopment and neurodegenerative diseases, and we don't have therapies to treat or cure them. Some of the neurosurgeons and clinicians I encountered said that all we can do right now is make the patients comfortable. We need to develop new drugs and therapies to treat and cure these diseases. This inspired me to go deep into this field.”
- Yingzhi Ye, Ph.D. candidate
BIOGRAPHY
Yingzhi Ye was born in Hangzhou, China, located in the Zhejiang province. Hangzhou is noted globally for its contributions to science. Ye is proud to be from Hangzhou and on her own journey to make a mark on the world through science.
Ye’s mother and father are both graduates of Zhejiang University. Her mother holds a degree in education and worked in administration. Her father holds a degree in biomedical engineering and became a professor.
Ye was drawn to Chinese and English in school, then became interested in the sciences when she entered junior high school. She favored chemistry and bioscience. Ye credits two supportive teachers for this passion. Ye’s dad also played a role in her scientific leanings, teaching her about the research process and occasionally taking her to work with him. Ye loved interacting with her father’s students and watching them learn. When not studying, Ye enjoyed playing sports.
Ye worked hard to be competitive and was accepted into an excellent high school. But after graduation, she was unsure of her future career plans. She had no idea what major she wanted to choose. She chose to attend her parents’ alma mater, Zhejiang University, hoping to find a career path.
During her freshman year, she found inspiration in her clinical classes, where she observed clinicians working at patients’ bedsides. Ye noted the needs and struggles of those hospital patients. She also worked as an undergraduate researcher in a lab studying autism, which inspired her interest in neuroscience and the brain. Ye briefly considered becoming a doctor. Many of her peers were taking that route. But they told Ye that while they can work to treat and cure patients, they also know there is still much to learn about diseases. “We need basic science to discover cures,” they told her.
In Ye’s fourth year of college, she took an internship in a lab at Harvard University. She connected with the lab’s principal investigator when he taught and collaborated at Zhejiang University. A year later, she applied and was accepted to Johns Hopkins University.
Today, Ye is a Ph.D. candidate in her fourth year at Johns Hopkins. She is studying Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, also known as ALS, in the Department of Physiology’s Sun Laboratory.
“There are a lot of neurodevelopment and neurodegenerative diseases, and we don't have therapies to treat or cure them. Some of the neurosurgeons and clinicians I encountered said that all we can do right now is make the patients comfortable. We need to develop new drugs and therapies to treat and cure these diseases. This inspired me to go deep into this field.”
- Yingzhi Ye, Ph.D. candidate
Research Focus
Challenges
There is a wide range of neurological disorders and diseases, and they are exceedingly difficult to treat. Clinical challenges include unpredictable disease progressions, relapses, and severe disability. The World Health Organization reports that up to 1 billion people worldwide are affected by neurological disorders. The causes of neurological disorders can be related to genetics, congenital abnormalities, infections, and injury.
One of these neurological diseases is ALS. Ye is part of a team studying a pathological protein found in ALS patients in hopes of learning why it is mass localized in those patients. The team is also investigating the physiological and pathological functions of this protein in neurons.
Focus and Priorities
Ye’s research examines a protein found in human postmortem tissue and is disordered in a way that causes it to accumulate and clump together. The pathological protein is found in up to 90% of cases of ALS.
The team can observe the survival phenotype when the protein dysfunctions. They perform a genomic screening to find modifiers that can rescue the survival phenotype induced by this protein dysfunction.
All people possess this protein. If the protein becomes dysfunctional during the embryonic stage, a person won’t survive. It is an essential protein, and its pathology can be observed in many neurological diseases. The protein may mutate in an embryo and manifest in a neurological disease later in life. Ye and fellow investigators want to find the target that can rescue the loss of function of this protein.
Benefits
Ye and fellow researchers used a tool that enables large-scale screening based on survival phenotypes by genetic manipulation. Using this method, Ye validated one top target in vitro.
The team discovered that there is a drug already in a preclinical trial that was supposed to treat another type of disease but failed. Now, they want to learn if this drug could work to rescue the loss of function of the pathological protein found in most ALS patients. They aim to evaluate this drug in mouse models.
Karen Toffler Charitable Trust Investment
Funding from the Karen Toffler Charitable Trust will support Ye and her fellow researchers in acquiring mice for drug testing. They’ll test samples to see how different phenotypes behave and determine if motor dysfunction can be rescued. They'll use a staining process to see if anything changes between their test and control groups. They plan to share their findings through publication.
Karen Toffler Charitable Trust Investment
Funding from the Karen Toffler Charitable Trust will support Ye and her fellow researchers in acquiring mice for drug testing. They’ll test samples to see how different phenotypes behave and determine if motor dysfunction can be rescued. They'll use a staining process to see if anything changes between their test and control groups. They plan to share their findings through publication.
“I want people to know more about neurological diseases than about me. The more people know, the more they can advocate on behalf of people with these diseases and the more emphasis can be placed on putting money, time, and research energy into finding cures.”
- Yingzhi Ye, Ph.D. candidate