Yan was trained as a biologist at Imperial College London, before receiving graduate training in Genomics and Microbiology at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, where he has specialised in microbiome research using both computational and experimental approaches.
During his PhD study in the Lawley group, Yan led the investigation of the Baby Biome Study, a UK birth cohort focusing on the early-life dynamics in the human gut microbiota, through high-throughput next-generation sequencing and bacterial culturing.
His current research interests focus on identifying predictive microbiome markers and bacteriotherapy candidates for childhood health and diseases, by leveraging large-scale metagenomic, long-read sequencing and microbiological data of infant microbiome datasets across the globe.