Yuan He received his PhD in Biochemistry and Biophysics from Northwestern University, utilizing nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy to study endocytosis and transcriptional repressive complexes. He then continued his research in structural biology, employing cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, to reveal the architecture of the human transcription preinitiation complex and uncover mechanistic details of how transcription starts at promoters. In 2015, Dr. He returned to Northwestern University to establish his independent lab, focusing on the molecular mechanisms by which large, multisubunit complexes engage in DNA-centric processes. In 2024, Dr. He joined Johns Hopkins University as Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Structural Biophysics and Chromatin Biology to further his research on the structure and mechanism of how cells read, write, and repair the genome.