Yinan Wan received her B.S. in Biological Sciences from Peking University, China. She then pursued a Ph.D. in Physiology, Development and Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge (UK) as part of a joint graduate program with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus (USA). During her Ph.D., she worked with Prof. William Harris on zebrafish retinal development, and subsequently with Dr. Philipp Keller at Janelia to study the emergence of neural activity in the developing zebrafish nervous system. She then moved to the laboratory of Prof. Alexander Schier at the University of Basel (Switzerland) for her postdoctoral research, where she developed spatial transcriptomics approaches to study vertebrate embryogenesis.

In her own lab, Yinan will combine spatial transcriptomics, live imaging, and computational modeling to investigate how tissues are built with remarkable precision and reproducibility, using the zebrafish retina and early embryo as model systems. She will join the Center for Integrative Genomics (CIG) at the University of Lausanne as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in January 2027.