Shengyuan received his PhD in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology in March 2022 under the mentorship of Dr. Iosif Vaisman at George Mason University (GMU), Manassas, Virgnia. He earned a Master of Sciences in Pharmaceutical Sciences from North Carolina Central University in 2016 and a Bachelor of Science in Biotechnology from China Agricultural University in 2013. He is interested in learning how protein structures and functions are influenced by silent mutations.Shengyuan's dissertation focused on investigating the protein structure variations resulted from silent mutations. He built a dataset containing 10,220 individual proteins capturing sequences and structural information from BLAST and PDB, serving as the major database for the dissertation research. He designed and investigates the relationship between protein structure and topological variations in amino acid residues encoded by synonymous codons using knowledge-based potentials.
Shengyuan now works as a postdoc in Dr. Chongzhi Zang's lab at UVA.