Feng Yue, PhD, the Duane and Susan Burnham Professor of Molecular Medicine in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics, has been inducted into the 2025 class of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) College of Fellows.
Election to the AIMBE College of Fellows is among the highest professional distinctions accorded to medical and biological engineers, comprising the top two percent of engineers in these fields. College membership honors those who have made outstanding contributions to engineering and medicine research, practice or education and to the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of medical and biological engineering or developing and/or implementing innovative approaches to bioengineering education.
Yue, who is also director of the Center for Advanced Molecular Analysis and founding director of the Center for Cancer Genomics at the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University, is among the 172 engineers in the College of Fellows Class of 2025. The cohort was formally inducted during AIMBE’s Annual Event on March 31 in Arlington, Virginia.
Yue was nominated, reviewed and elected by peers and members of the College of Fellows for the development of algorithms and visualization tools in genome annotation and regulatory network in human disease and evolution.
“Being inducted into the AIMBE College of Fellows is a tremendous honor,” Yue said. “I’m privileged to be part of a community constantly pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in medicine and biology. I’m also incredible grateful to Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine for providing an inspiring and supportive research environment where scientific curiosity can flourish.”
Yue’s research focuses on developing genomic technologies and machine learning methods editing to discover and investigate the impact of genetic variants in human cancers. He has been an active member and leader of several large NIH funded consortia, including the ENCODE, Roadmap/Epigenomics and 4D Nucleome projects. Currently, he co-chairs the Steering Committee of the Impact of Genomic Variation on Function Consortium (IGVF), which is a $185 million imitative across 30 U.S. institute funded by the NIH over five years to investigate how genomic variation alters genome function and contribute to human health and disease.
Recent research from Yue was published in Cell, in which he and his team revealed a three-dimensional view of the genetic mutations pattern in glioblastoma, the most lethal primary brain tumor in adults. They demonstrated the glioblastoma evolution and heterogeneity from a whole-tumor perspective, and the results may help identify novel therapeutic targets in which current precision therapies have otherwise failed to effectively treat, due to tumor heterogeneity.
In another recent study published in Science Advances, Yue and his team discovered that inhibiting the GATA6 protein in mouse models of colon cancer reduced tumor growth and improved survival, underscoring the potential of a new therapeutic target for colon cancer.
