Mentors

Yung-Chi Cheng

Henry Bronson Professor of Pharmacology

Department of Pharmacology, Yale School of Medicine

Chairman, Consortium for the Globalization of Chinese Medicine (CGCM)

Research Focus

Dr. Cheng's laboratory studies and develops novel anti-cancer and anti-viral drugs, with programs spanning hepatocellular carcinoma, pancreatic cancer, colorectal cancer, and melanoma in oncology, and HBV, HCV, HIV, EBV, and CMV in virology. His lab currently applies systems biology approaches to developing multi-targeted medicines for cancer and other aging-related diseases. He has championed the vision of WE Medicine — a convergence of Western reductionist pharmacology and Eastern multi-target, polychemical herbal medicine — building the Consortium for the Globalization of Chinese Medicine with partners across Asia. His lab works extensively with plant extracts and complex herbal mixtures, evaluating their pharmacological activity against disease-relevant targets in cancer and chronic inflammatory conditions.

Role in My Training

Dr. Cheng provides primary mentorship in multi-target herbal pharmacology, systems biology approaches to complex mixture evaluation, and the strategic interpretation of polypharmacological herbal interventions in disease.

Jason Cai

Associate Professor of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, and of Pharmacology

Wu Tsai Institute · Yale School of Medicine

Research Focus

Dr. Cai specializes in the development and translation of novel PET imaging probes for drug PK/PD studies and the investigation of CNS disorders and oncology. His group has pioneered SV2A PET tracers for in vivo quantification of synaptic density, enabling direct measurement of synapse loss in Alzheimer's disease, traumatic brain injury, and stress-related conditions. Trained in medicinal chemistry and radiopharmaceutical sciences, he completed postdoctoral work in oncology PET imaging at the University of Pittsburgh before joining the Yale PET Center in 2015 to expand into brain imaging. His work spans biomarker development, quantitative pharmacokinetics, and preclinical-to-clinical translation of PET probes across neurodegenerative disease and oncology.

Role in My Training

Dr. Cai provides expertise in PET imaging for in vivo pharmacodynamic evaluation of herbal interventions in disease-relevant models.

Yansheng Liu

Associate Professor of Pharmacology

Department of Pharmacology · Yale School of Medicine

Associate Professor, Biomedical Informatics & Data Science · Yale Cancer Biology Institute · Yale Cancer Center

Research Focus

Dr. Liu leads a quantitative proteomics group at the Yale Cancer Biology Institute, focused on how protein turnover and post-translational modifications shape cellular function and drive human disease. His lab pioneered the DeltaSILAC MS method to quantify how phosphorylation affects protein turnover, and recently profiled turnover for 11,000 proteins and ~40,000 phosphosites across eight mouse tissues and brain regions. He investigates how chromosome aneuploidy alters proteostasis and phosphorylation networks in cancer, with work published in Science, Molecular Cell, and Cell. His lab has recently installed state-of-the-art MALDI imaging mass spectrometry and integrates lipidomic-proteomic approaches to advance spatial understanding of molecular dynamics at the single-cell and clinical scale.

Role in My Training

Dr. Liu guides my use of DIA-MS, lipidomics, and MALDI imaging mass spectrometry for quantitative and spatially resolved profiling of lipid–protein network alterations in disease.