Yi-Rong Peng, Ph.D.
Faculty
Assistant Professor
Department of Ophthalmology
Jules Stein Eye Institute
David Geffen School of Medicine
University of California, Los Angeles
UCLA Jules Stein Institute
100 Stein Plaza, Room B-222B
Los Angeles, CA 90095
Biography
Dr. Peng received her PhD in neurobiology from the Institute of Neuroscience, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China in 2011. Her doctoral research examined the role of functional interactions between inhibitory and excitatory synapses that maintain the stability of neural networks. She then joined the laboratory of Dr. Joshua Sanes at Harvard University, where she was a postdoctoral fellow until 2019. In her postdoctoral work, she leveraged high throughput single-cell transcriptomic methods to uncover key transcriptional factors that control the specification of retinal cell types.
At the Stein Eye Institute she will continue to develop state-of-the-art transcriptomic and genomic tools to uncover the molecular underpinnings of the formation of retinal circuits and the pathogenesis of retinal diseases.
Publications
- Wang J, Zhang L, Cavallini M, Pahlevan A, Sun J, Morshedian A, Fain GL, Sampath AP, Peng YR. Molecular characterization of the sea lamprey retina illuminates the evolutionary origin of retinal cell types.. Nature communications, 2024.
- Peng YR. Cell-type specification in the retina: Recent discoveries from transcriptomic approaches.. Current opinion in neurobiology, 2023.
- Peng YR, Sampath AP. LRR-ning the Rules: Synapse Organization in the Primary Rod Pathway.. Neuron, 2020.