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Yue (Cindy) Yang grew up in a university environment in her home country of China, and from a young age she pictured herself as a professor at a university. Her father is a mechanical engineering professor and her mother is a dentist, and both helped inspire her to seek a life of science, though her inspiration is also internal.

“I’ve always loved science,” Yang said, “especially biology.”

Cindy Yang

After earning a bachelor’s degree from the Chinese University in Hong Kong, Yang wasted no time in continuing her education and moved to the U.S. to get her master’s. She chose the University of Nebraska so she could study with Ji-Young Lee in the nutritional sciences department. Yang was drawn to the lab’s astaxanthin work, and she enjoyed Lee’s mentorship so much that when Lee moved to the University of Connecticut, Yang followed, joining the Ph.D. program there and continuing her work in the lab.

During her Ph.D., Yang studied the health effects of astaxanthin, an antioxidant carotenoid compound found in algae. She thrived in the lab, loving the freedom to follow the science.

“Sometimes you go into a lab and everything is established, and you just follow and do what everyone has been doing,” she said. “But when I was in Dr. Lee’s lab, we’d have to find what the next step is and decide for ourselves what to do. It was a great experience.”

She took these skills into her postdoctoral fellowship at Weill Cornell Medicine, where she studies NAD⁺ metabolism in Anthony Sauve’s lab and recently was promoted to instructor. That young girl who always saw herself as a professor seems to be well on her way, following where the science takes her.