Dr. Shan Yan – 2022 Outstanding Data Science Faculty Research Award

Congratulations to Dr. Shan Yan on the 2022 Outstanding Data Science Faculty Research Award! Each year, SDS awards an SDS faculty member for their significant achievements in data science research. As this year’s winner, Dr. Yan will receive a plaque acknowledging his outstanding research contribution and a $2,000 research award that can be used to cover any research-related expenses, such as conference travel, data and software purchase, and compensation for study participants.

Dr. Shan Yan is Professor and Associate Chair for Research in the Department of Biological Sciences within the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences (CLAS) and Affiliated Faculty with the School of Data Science (SDS) at UNC Charlotte. He has initiated and directed the Charlotte Biology and Biotechnology (CBB) Exchange Group co-sponsored by North Carolina Biotechnology Center (NCBC) and UNC Charlotte since 2017. He is the Director of the Board for the Federation of American Society For Experimental Biology (FASEB, representing ~27 scientific societies and ~115k scientists), and is also the Program Leader of the Genome Integrity and Cancer Initiative (GICI) at UNC Charlotte. He has served as grant reviewer for the NIH study sections and NSF Review Panels. Dr. Yan also serves as managing editor or editorial board member for several journals such as Environmental and Molecular Mutagenesis, and manuscript reviewer for ~46 scientific journals including Science, PNAS, and eLife. His research laboratory is focused on the molecular mechanisms of genome integrity and cancer etiology using Xenopus egg extracts and mammalian cell lines as model systems. His research program is highly interdisciplinary and collaborative and often involves collaborators with expertise in data science, structural bioinformatics, chemistry and nanoparticles, physics and structural biology, cancer biology, and therapeutics. During 2022, he published 4 peer-reviewed articles and 2 preprints as corresponding or senior author and submitted 1 patent application to USPTO as the sole inventor. His original research article on APE1 function and mechanism in liquid-liquid phase separation and nucleolar DNA damage response in Nucleic Acids Research has led to his Forum Article featured in Trends in Cell Biology. These high-impact studies in top-tier journals have been highlighted in a news release in EurekAlert by AAAS and media reports such as Science Magazine. Dr. Yan also co-authored a research article in Small demonstrating a nanoparticle-based approach for targeted delivery of chemotherapy drugs to pancreatic cancers, which has brought a total cost of $2.1M NIH/NCI R01 grant to UNC Charlotte (as Co-Investigator). In 2022, his pioneering research on APE2 in genome integrity has also been awarded an NIH/NCI R03 grant (as Principal Investigator).