Principal Investigator

Yichun He, Ph.D.

Yichun He is an incoming assistant professor at the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she will establish He Lab in 2027. She was an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center Fellow at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where she worked with Caroline Uhler on causal and multimodal approaches to biology. In 2024, she worked with Aviv Regev as a research intern at Genentech, developing autonomous AI agents for spatial biology and language models for DNA sequence design. Her research develops AI methods to connect molecular, spatial, and functional views of biological systems, with the goal of understanding and improving human health and intelligence. Her work spans spatial atlases, multimodal learning, neural decoding, and AI agents for scientific discovery. She earned her PhD in Engineering Sciences at Harvard University, advised by Xiao Wang and Jia Liu, and her bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering at the University of Science and Technology of China with the highest honor.