Jie Yun

Jie Yun is a 2023 Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) fellow and PhD student in the department of civil and environmental engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Jie was awarded the J-WAFS fellowship for her outstanding research on plant response to drought stress, in the hopes of improving agricultural sustainability and yield under climate change. Much of her work focuses on genotype-by-environment interaction, which relates to the observation that plant varieties respond to environmental changes differently. Her work aims to help identify the types of genes and pathways that drive differences in drought stress response among plant varieties.

She has collaborated with J-WAFS principal investigator Caroline Uhler and her research group in the department of electrical engineering and computer science and the Institute for Data, Systems and Society to use computational tools to evaluate gene regulatory networks and how they relate to plant resilience and environmental adaptation. She is also advised by J-WAFS principal investigator David Des Marais and has worked on his J-WAFS funded project, 'Novel systems biology tools for improving crop tolerance to abiotic stressors'.

Jie took an undergraduate degree from Shenyang Jianzhu University in China. She went on to complete a master’s degree in civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University before joining MIT.