Prof. Jing Yang University of California San Diego, USA

Dr. Jing Yang is a Professor of Pharmacology and Pediatrics at University of California, San Diego. She obtained her PhD in Molecular Cancer Biology with Dr. Sally Kornbluth at Duke University in 1999. In 2000, Dr. Yang became a Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Robert Weinberg... read moreat Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and identified a critical role of the Twist1 transcription factor and Epithelial-Mesenchymal Transition (EMT) in tumor metastasis.

Dr. Yang joined the faculty of University of California, San Diego in 2006 and is currently a professor at UCSD Moores Cancer Center. Dr. Yang’s research focuses on understanding the molecular basis of tumor metastasis. Her laboratory combines cell and molecular biology tools, mouse tumor models, 3D organoids culture, functional genomics, and 2D/3D imaging techniques to uncover the genes and the signaling pathways responsible for tumor metastasis. Her group has identified invadopodia-mediated extracellular matrix degradation, matrix stiffening, and epithelial polarity as being critical regulatory mechanisms of EMT and tumor metastasis and continues to address the dynamic involvement of these programs in metastasis.