Yapeng Su received his bachelor’s degree with the highest honor from Tianjin University. In his undergraduate studies, he first worked with Prof. Rongxin Su and Prof. Zhimin He, focusing on process engineering of lignocellulose pretreatment for biofuel production. In his junior year, he extended his research to synthetic biology and biomolecular design and engineering, supervised by Prof. Yingjin Yuan. His research work there, as part of the iGEM and BIOMOD international competitions held by MIT and Harvard University respectively, were awarded two Gold Medals.

After undergraduate study, Yapeng was awarded the CEMI fellowship for graduate study at Caltech. Currently, Yapeng is pursuing his Ph.D. degree in chemical engineering at Caltech, supervised by Prof. James Heath, co-advised by Prof. Mark Davis and Prof. David Baltimore. He also has a minor in Systems Biology from Caltech. Yapeng’s Ph.D. research resides at the intersection of bionanotechnology and systems biology with a particular focus on cancer. Cancer cells are heterogeneous and complex: each tumor cell is different from one to the other and within each individual tumor cells, the regulatory networks are also complexed with various regulators involved. Yapeng’s research focuses on developing and utilizing microfluidic-based single-cell multi-omics technologies to characterize the heterogeneous tumor cells during the time course of therapy resistance development. In parallel, the other aspect of Yapeng’s research focuses on developing and utilizing computational and systems biology analysis methods to digest high-dimensional multi-omics big data of cancer (including transcriptomic, proteomic, metabolic and epigenomic data at both bulk and single-cell levels.)