Jason X.-J. Yuan

Jason X.-J. Yuan

Fellow: Awarded 2008
Field of Study: Medicine and Health

Competition: US & Canada

University of California, San Diego

Dr. Yuan received his medical degree from Suzhou Medical College (1983). His Ph.D. in physiology (1993) was granted jointly by Peking Union Medical College and the University of Maryland, Baltimore; he was a postdoctoral Fellow at the latter from 1988 to 1991.

After earning his Ph.D., he joined the faculty of the University of Maryland as an independent investigator in the department of physiology. In 1993 he accepted an appointment in its Department of Medicine as an assistant professor and was promoted to associate professor in 1998. He joined the faculty of the University of California, San Diego, as a professor in its Department of Medicine in 2003, and became Vice Chair for Research in 2007. He then moved to Chicago to take a position of professor in the Departments of Medicine and Pharmacology, University of Illinois at Chicago in June 2010. He is currently Director of the Pulmonary Hypertension Research Program of the Institute for Personalized Respiratory Medicine and Director of the Program in Pulmonary Vascular Disease and Right Heart Function of the Center for Cardiovascular Research in the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Dr. Yuan’s research on pulmonary vascular pathophysiology and ion channel electrophysiology, the identification of a role for voltage-gated potassium channels in the regulation of pulmonary vascular tone, and studies of the modulation and role of these channels in pulmonary hypertension have received wide recognition. He has published his researches in roughly three dozen book chapters and about as many peer-reviewed articles, in such esteemed journals as Lancet, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, American Journal of Physiology, Nature Medicine, and New England Journal of Medicine. He has also edited and co-edited four books: Hypoxic Pulmonary Vasoconstriction: Cellular and Molecular Mechanisms (Kluwer, 2004), Ion Channels in the Pulmonary Vasculature (Taylor & Francis Group, 2005), Membrane Receptors, Channels and Transporters in Pulmonary Circulation (Humana Press, 2010), and Textbook of Pulmonary Vascular Disease (Springer, 2011). Since 2000, he has served on the editorial boards of Respiratory Research, American Journal of Physiology Lung Cellular and Moelcular Physiology, Clinical Medicine Insights: Circulatory, Respiratory and Pulmonary Medicine, American Journal of Physiology Heart and Circulatory Physiology. He is currently Associate Editor of American Journal of Physiology Cell Physiology and Editor-in-Chief of Pulmonary Circulation.

His many awards include the Dr. C. W. Dunker Award from the Society of Chinese Biophysicists in America (1993); Molecular Kinetics Award (1993); the American Physiological Society’s Giles F. Filley Memorial Award for Excellence in Respiratory Physiology and Medicine (1995) and Harold Lamport Award (1998); the American Heart Association’s Cournand and Comroe Young Investigator Award (1995), Best Abstract Award (1996), and Established Investigator Award (1998). Dr. Yuan is also an Elected Fellow of both the American Physiological Society and American Heart Association, a Senior Fellow of the Pulmonary Vascular Research Institute, an Elected Member of the American Society of Clinical Investigators, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The World Health Organization, American Thoracic Society, Chinese Association for Physiological Sciences, the United Kingdom’s Royal Society, and the Instituto Juan March De Estudios e Investigaciones in Spain are but a few of the organizations that have invited Dr. Yuan to lecture, and he has been a visiting professor at many institutions in the U.S. and around the world, including the University of Oxford, Imperial College London, King’s College London, Chinese Academy of Medicine, Albert Einstein School of Medicine in New York City, the University of Chicago, and Dartmouth Medical School.

During his Guggenheim Fellowship term, Dr. Yuan undertook a study of the role of ion channels in human embryonic stem cell proliferation and differentiation, with a goal of furthering understanding of the pathogenic and therapeutic roles of stem cells in pulmonary vascular disease.

 

 

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