Yofi Wyle

Education

• University of California, Irvine

Bio

As an undergraduate at UC Irvine, I studied hair follicle signaling in the context of skin regeneration. The projected I assisted with hoped to elucidate the role of leptin in hair stem cell activation, and ultimately, how we can leverage hair follicle signaling to mitigate scar formation after wounding.

After graduating in three years, I took a year off to tutor students in math, biology, chemistry, physics, English, and Spanish; before starting my PhD here, at UC Santa Barbara.

During my first year as a PhD student, I had the opportunity to rotate through several incredible labs and gain hands-on experience conducting heart stem cell (cardiomyocyte) and breast cancer research. More recently, I have begun working on a project using a stem cell-derived tissue, called organoids, to model human neural tube defects. As a graduate student, I have had the opportunity to direct two student-led projects: the first used publicly available software to computationally model antiviral molecules against the novel coronavirus, and the second generated a curated list of guide RNA sequences for CRISPR knockout experiments.

In the future, I hope to branch out to lung organoid research to recapitulate stages of human lung development, while generating preclinical data for stem cell-mediated lung regeneration.