Research

I am studying the aesthetics of breast shape under Grant Thomson in the Section of Plastic Surgery in the Department of Surgery at Yale. I will determine the relationship between breast volume, surface area, and anthropomorphic measurements that results in the most aesthetically pleasing shape, with the ultimate goal of optimizing patient satisfaction in cosmetic and reconstructive breast surgeries.

In addition, I am working with Dr. Thomson to correlate free flap survival with intra-operative patient temperatures.

I am also studying the natural history of the pseudogenes of glycolytic enzymes in Mark Gerstein's lab in the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale.

During college, I worked in Steve Altschuler and Lani Wu's lab for three years when we were located at the Harvard Center for Genomics Research. I developed computational models to simulate gene networks and applied hidden Markov models to tiled genomic microarray data. I was second author in the following publication:

• Genome-scale identification of nucleosome positions in S. cerevisiae.
  Yuan GC, Liu YJ, Dion MF, Slack MD, Wu LF, Altschuler SJ, Rando OJ.
  Science, 2005 Jul 22; 309(5734):626-30.
  PubMed Citation | Publication Link
  

During college, I also worked in Marvin Minsky's lab at the MIT Media Labs on the Open Mind Common Sense Project, building data structures to represent common sense knowledge and reasoning.

In high school, I explored an unsolved problem in number theory at the Research Science Institute (RSI 1999) and analyzed gastrointestinal creatine absorption by infrared spectroscopy in 11th grade chemistry.