Peng Yin

Email:

Phone: 617 432 7731. Fax: 617 432 7828

Office: Room 1050, HIM Building

Mail: Wyss Institute, 4 Blackfan Circle, HIM 10 Floor Rm 1050, Boston, MA 02115

I have just joined the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School as an Assistant Professor in January 2010. I am also serving as a Core Faculty member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University.

I am inviting applicants for post-docs and grad students. Students need to be in a Harvard graduate program (e.g. SysBio, SEAS, Chemistry, Biophysics, BBS etc.)

I was a senior postdoctoral scholar in bioengineering and computer science at Caltech's Center for Biological Circuit Design, which is part of Caltech's Information Science and Technology initiative. At Caltech, I primarily worked with Prof. Niles A. Pierce and Prof. Erik Winfree.

Before joining Caltech, I obtained a Ph.D. in computer science under Prof. John H. Reif and a M.Sc. in molecular cancer biology, both from Duke University. Before coming to Duke, I graduated from Peking University with a B.Sc. in biochemistry and molecular biology and a Bachelor in Economics.

My research interests lie at the interface of information science, molecular engineering, and biology. The current focus is to engineer information directed self-assembly of nucleic acid (DNA/RNA) structures and devices, and to exploit such systems to do useful molecular work, e.g. probing and programming biological processes for imaging and therapeutic applications.

My Curriculum Vitae can be found here.

Recent publications:

  • Programming Biomolecular Self-Assembly Pathways. P. Yin, H.M.T. Choi, C.R. Calvert, N.A. Pierce. Nature, 451:318-322, 2008

    [The abstraction of a DNA hairpin motif is used to program diverse self-assembly (and disassembly) pathways. Paper download.]

    [Highlighted in "The year in Nature", which features Nature manuscript editors' 22 favorites in 2008. See Caltech's news release and NSF's news release. See excellent commentaries: "Biomolecular assembly: Dynamic DNA" by W. Shih in Nature Materials (pdf), "Rational engineering of dynamic DNA systems" by U. Feldkamp and C.M. Niemeyer in Angew. Chemie. (pdf), and "Tying new knots in synthetic biology" by D.K. Karig and M.L. Simpson in HFSP Journal (pdf). ]

  • Programming DNA Tube Circumferences. P. Yin, R.F. Hariadi, S. Sahu, H.M.T. Choi, S.H. Park, T.H. LaBean, J.H. Reif. Science, 321:824-826, 2008

    [Synthetic molecular tubes with monodisperse, programmable circumferences are self-assembled using a single-stranded DNA motif. Paper download.]

    [Highlighted in Nature Nanotechnology. See Caltech's news release. ]

    • Old publications

    Recent talks:

  • Emergence in Chemical Systems 2.0 Conference, Anchorage, June 25th, 2009.
  • Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, Columbia Medical School, New York City, May 22nd, 2009.
  • Dept. of Biomedical Engineering, Boston University, Boston, Apr. 10th, 2009.
  • Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Dept. of Systems Biology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Apr. 8th, 2009.
  • Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, School of Engineering & Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, Apr. 7th, 2009.
  • Dept. of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University, New York City, Mar. 31st, 2009.
  • Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mar. 16th, 2009.
  • Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, University of California, Santa Barbara, Mar. 2nd, 2009.
  • Dept. of Bioengineering, Rice University, Houston, Feb. 18th, 2009.
  • Dept. of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Feb. 5th, 2009.
  • SBE's 2nd International Conference on Biomolecular Engineering, Santa Barbara, Jan. 21st, 2009.
  • Dept. of Chemistry, University of California, Berkeley, Dec. 11th, 2008.