Xia Yang

2000D Terasaki

Xia Yang, Ph.D., is Professor in the Department of Integrative Biology and Physiology and Department of Molecular and Medical Pharmacology at UCLA. She also serves as the Vice Chair of Molecular, Celular, and Integrative Physiology (MCI) Interdepartmental Ph.D. Program and Vice Chair of Computational and Systems Biology (CaSB) interdepartmental Undergraduate Program. She received her B.S in Pharmacy from Shandong Medical University in China and Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics and Bioinformatics from Georgia State University. She had her postdoctoral training in Systems Genetics at UCLA with Dr. Jake Lusis. She was Senior Research Scientist at Rosetta Inpharmatics/Merck & Co. and Director of Systems Biology at Sage Bionetworks prior to returning to UCLA as a faculty member.

Research Description:

Dr. Yang’s group aims to leverage big data driven systems biology and computational approaches to understand multitissue multiomics biological networks underlying a wide range of complex diseases (e.g., cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, Alzheimer’s disease, traumatic brain injury) and physiological traits (e.g., drug response, sex difference, aging). Our goal is to understand the complex molecular, intercellular, and intertissue processes involved in pathophysiology to guide the development of new therapeutics. We develop computational tools to integrate tissue and single cell multiomics data (genetic, epigenetic, transcriptomic, proteomic, metabolomic, microbiome) into molecular networks and apply such methods to understand causal mechanisms, pinpoint network regulators as targets, and predict therapeutics based on matches in molecular networks.