Shin-Yi is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Molecular Biology at Rowan University-School of Osteopathic Medicine in Stratford, NJ. Her research into the sex determination pathway in the nematode animal model is at the intersection of genetics, developmental biology, and evolutionary biology. She is currently funded by an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral fellowship. The jury is still out as to whether she will stay on the academic path towards a professorship…or not.
She went to college at Amherst College, where she majored in Biology and English. Her graduate studies at Princeton were funded by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. In 2011, she took a three month break from dissertation writing to participate in the Mirzayan Science and Engineering Policy Fellowship with the National Academies of Science in Washington D.C
Shin-Yi advocates passionately for education, science literacy, racial and economic equality, and feminism–in part because of her personal experience studying at places like Amherst and Princeton as a second-generation immigrant, raised by a struggling single mother. She strongly believes that academia and universities need to become more engaged with the general public at large–sharing the value of the research, mentoring, and teaching that happens on our campuses.