Yuan is a PhD student in Philosophy in the Department of Statistical Sciences at University of Toronto, where she works under the supervision of Jun Young Park, Jesse Gronsbell and Daniel Felsky.

Yuan’s research interest is in statistical genetics, imaging genetics, and electronic health records (EHR). Yuan received her BSc in Statistics from Pennsylvania State University and her MA in Statistics from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Prior to her doctoral studies, Yuan worked at a commercial genetic testing lab conducting research using both company genetic data and public databases, such as UK Biobank (UKB) data and The Genome Aggregation Database (gnomAD). Her research has been published is several peer-reviewed journal including Scientific Reports and Genetics in Medicine.

Yuan received this year’s award for the project: A novel mediation analysis pipeline to leverage high-dimensional and multimodal MRI as mediators in Alzheimer’s disease GWAS

The goal of her project is to develop a novel mediation analysis pipeline to leverage high dimensional and multimodal MRI as mediators in GWAs by (1) identifying genetic risk factors mediated by brain functions or anatomy, (2) extend the method so that is fully utilized by summary statistics to improve reproducibility of the findings, and (3) develop an open source R package that will be made publicly available on GitHub.