Yao Bi

About

Pronouns: she/her

Languages: English, Mandarin

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Yao Bi has been interested in science for as long as she can remember. It likely started while she was sketching the scrub jays flitting around her backyard and comparing them to the scrub jays she’d spotted on Santa Cruz island. She would later learn that the differences were a result of insular evolution, and as such her initial scientific loves were ecology and phylogenetics. She has since developed a passion for molecular biology/genetics and pharmacology during her undergraduate education at UC San Diego where she received her B.S. in General Biology. 

While completing her bachelor’s degree at UC San Diego, she joined a structural biology and nanobody discovery lab where she primarily conducted research screening for nanobodies for antigens implicated in various medical conditions (glaucoma, rheumatoid arthritis, etc.). She received the TRELS scholarship from UC San Diego in 2023 to continue her research over the summer, and presented her work at the Summer Research Conference hosted by the university. 

Yao is currently continuing her research in the same lab, and hopes to find a nanobody with high enough binding affinity and specificity to one of the antigens she’s working with and continue down her path as a researcher. She works to move genes into bacterial, insect, or mammalian expression systems for large-scale production and purification, and screen for nanobodies with flow cytometry. She is dedicated to making her goal of obtaining and using a Ph.D. to mitigate some of the hardships individuals with medical conditions face through biomedical research.

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Awards and Honors:

Triton Research and Experiential Learning Scholar (TRELS, UCSD)

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Selected Works:

Bi, Y. ,Shi, X., and Chang, G. Discovering NaCT-specific Nanobodies. Oral presentation delivered at the UC San Diego Summer Research Conference, La Jolla, CA, August 2023.