Fan Yang

I am a postdoctoral scholar in Biology and Biological Engineering at Caltech, where I work with Prof. Matt Thomson. I earned my PhD in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University with Prof. Howard A. Stone, where I studied interfacial flows and active matter. I completed my B.E. in Mechanical Engineering at Tsinghua University. My academic path blends a foundation in mechanics with quantitative biology, leading me to tackle problems at the interface of engineering and life sciences.

I aim to translate fundamental principles of biomechanics into programmable engineering and biomedical applications. Mechanical forces are not passive outcomes of biology—they actively regulate gene expression, cellular transitions, and tissue morphogenesis. My research integrates theoretical models, quantitative experiments, spatial omics, and data-driven inference to reveal how biological forces generate structure and function across scales. I have developed the Active Matter Programming Language for dynamic microfluidic control, uncovered self-healing mechanisms in cytoskeletal networks, and am currently building a Bayesian inference framework to extract cell motility from images and identify motility–gene correlations driving tumor progression. Together, my work establishes a roadmap toward programmable biomechanical principles that can inspire new bioengineering platforms, diagnostics, and therapeutic strategies.