Dr. Yue Feng
Dr. Yue Feng is a Professor of Pharmacology and Chemical Biology at Emory University School of Medicine. She received a Bachelor in Medicine from Beijing Medical University (now Peking University Health Science Center) in China, and a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from Vanderbilt University. She completed her postdoctoral training with Dr. Steven Warren in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Emory University. Dr. Feng was appointed as an assistant professor on the tenure track in the Department of Pharmacology at Emory University School of Medicine in 1998 and was promoted to full professor in 2011.
The research goal in Dr. Feng’s laboratory focuses on how RNA-binding proteins and noncoding RNAs govern normal brain function and how RNA dysregulation leads to neuropsychiatric and neurological diseases. Dr. Feng has a long standing interest in Fragile X syndrome (FXS), a leading cause of intellectual disability and autism. Dr. Feng discovered that abnormal translation underlies FXS pathogenesis and currently focuses on key players in synaptic signaling to explore possible pharmacological correction of FXS abnormalities. In addition, Dr. Feng’s team discovered a posttranscriptional network crucial for myelin formation and repair of the central nervous system, which is involved in multiple sclerosis and developmental myelin impairment in schizophrenia. Dr. Feng’s most recently funded new research project explores regulation and function of the noncoding transcriptome in human iPSC-derived neurons, particularly focusing on a novel pathway of schizophrenia in which risk factor small and long noncoding RNAs control early development of human neurons.