Research Areas:
Genetics, with emphasis on aminoacyl tRNA synthetases

Prof. Xiang-Lei Yang received her BS in Biomedical Engineering from Capital Institute of Medical Science (Beijing), and her PhD in Biophysics and Computational Biology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She was previously a postdoctoral fellow, Assistant Professor, Associate Professor and Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology and the Department of Chemical Physiology at The Scripps Research Institute. She is currently a Professor of Molecular Medicine at The Scripps Research Institute.

Prof. Yang studies cancer and neurodegenerative diseases through a multi-functional protein family. In the Schimmel-Yang laboratory, she leads the effort on elucidating the mechanism of the functional diversity of human aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases and understanding how different functions are activated and regulated.

Prof. Yang is the author or co-author of over 80 scientific publications. She is the scientific co-founder and advisor of aTyr Pharma, a biotherapeutics company which aims at developing tRNA synthetase-related molecules as therapeutic biologics.