YI SUN, PhD
Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences
Associate Professor Molecular and Medical Pharmacology

Yi Sun is assistant professor in both the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences and the Department of Molecular and Medical Pharmacology. She joined the UCLA faculty in the summer of 2001. Dr. Sun earned a Ph.D. in Neurosciences at Case Western Reserve University and did postdoctoral training in molecular developmental neuroscience at Harvard Medical School prior to her recruitment to UCLA. Dr. Sun studies molecular mechanisms underlying cell fate specification, proliferation, and differentiation of neural stem cells in mammals including humans. She is particularly interested in alterations in the transcriptional program via DNA methylation related epigenetic mechanisms during stem cell differentiation. In addition, her laboratory is also in the process of cultivating and genetically modifying human and mouse embryonic stem cells so that they can direct the differentiation process of the cells to produce various highly pure subtype neurons and glia in large quantity. This approach will allow not only the production of cells for use in repairing the injured nervous system through cell-replacement therapy but also building human neuronal culture models for a number of neurological diseases that can be used for studying disease etiology and drug screening.

Read more about Yi Sun:

• Yi Sun Lab
• David Geffen School of Medicine
• UCLA Nueroscience Program
• Molecular and Medical Pharmacology