Ji-Young Youn

Ji-Young earned her BS in Bioengineering from Yonsei University in South Korea in 2004. Through her experiences in the laboratories of Dr. Joe Ecker at the Salk Institute and Dr. Sarah Liljegren at the University of Chapel Hill, she became interested in pursuing research in Molecular Biology. 

She completed her PhD in the laboratory of Dr. Brenda Andrews at the University of Toronto in 2013. She focused on functional genetic interaction studies of kinase-regulated pathways and characterization of BAR domain proteins involved in the process of endocytosis. Following PhD, she switched fields to functional proteomics, working in the laboratory of Dr. Anne-Claude Gingras at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute in Sinai Health Systems. Her postdoctoral studies focused on investigating the constituents of cytosolic RNA granules in human cells. 

Research

Dr. Youn joined the SickKids Research Institute to establish her lab in June 2020. Her lab studies biomolecular condensates that organize subcellular systems and govern their ability to deal with stress. Using proteomics, genomics, and cell biological tools, her team investigates their organization, dynamics, and function. This work provides novel strategies to understand and treat neurodegenerative disorders, cancer and infectious diseases.

Education and experience

• 2000–2004: B.Sc., Biotechnology, Department of Engineering, Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea
• 2006–2013: PhD, Molecular Genetics, Department of Molecular Genetics, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada
• 2014–2020: Postdoctoral Fellow, Proteomics, Molecular, Cell and Systems Biology, Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, Toronto, ON, Canada