John Yin

Meet John Yin, a modern-day polymath whose journey has been propelled by a kaleidoscope of pursuits and accomplishments. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, a year before the Kennedy Administration, Yin was a son of roving economists and academics, forming his earliest memories in Crawfordsville, Indiana and Los Angeles before settling down in a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C.

Yin earned degrees in the liberal arts and chemical engineering from Columbia University in the City of New York. During his summers, he trained and published in molecular pharmacology at the National Cancer Institute of N.I.H. While honing his engineering and molecular biology skills, he also pursued cello studies at the Juilliard School, guided by a teacher associated with the legendary Yo-Yo Ma. His piano studies at Columbia led to an invitational performance of the Schumann Concerto with the University Orchestra.

Venturing west to UC-Berkeley, Yin earned a PhD developing a bio-mimetic material to adsorb toxic cadmium from industrial wastewater, an innovation that earned him his first US patent. It was during this period that he first became captivated by the power of natural selection – Nature’s method of irrational design to search out robust solutions to complex problems. He became intrigued; how might one explore processes of natural selection or evolution in the laboratory?

As a Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and amid the historical demise of the Berlin Wall, Yin pursued post-doctoral research with Nobel laureate Manfred Eigen at the Max-Planck-Institut für biophysikalische Chemie in Göttingen, Germany. By chance, he stumbled upon a way to detect and track the growth, spread, and evolution of viruses in a petri dish. Inspired to further probe viruses and their evolution, Yin started his academic career at Dartmouth College; during the Clinton administration he was awarded a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) by the U.S. National Science Foundation.

A couple years before Y2K, Yin was recruited to join the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is currently the Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering. Since 2010, he has also been a Founding-Five Faculty member of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, which focuses on interdisciplinary themes of robustness, resilience, and adaptability that span natural, engineered, and social systems.