Junying Yuan

Dr. Junying Yuan’s research has focused on understanding how cell death is regulated and contributes to human disease. As a Harvard graduate student with H. R. Horvitz at MIT, she demonstrated that ced-3 and ced-4 act within dying cells to execute programmed cell death in C. elegans. Her laboratory subsequently discovered the functional homology of ced-3 to mammalian caspase-1, helping establish the evolutionary conservation of apoptosis and the mammalian caspase field. Her group also discovered caspase-11 and its role in caspase-1 activation and sepsis. Challenging the view that necrosis is uncontrolled, her laboratory discovered necroptosis and identified necrostatin-1 as its inhibitor and RIPK1 kinase as its molecular target. Her subsequent studies established RIPK1 as a key signaling node integrating apoptosis, necroptosis, and inflammation. More recently, her work has demonstrated how dysregulated RIPK1 signaling contributes to microglial inflammation, neuronal injury, and neurodegeneration, providing mechanistic insights and therapeutic opportunities for neurological diseases.