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Yiteng Dang

Yiteng Dang

PhD student at TU Delft
(November 2015 - December 2019)

Next position:
ELBE Postdoctoral Fellow,
Max Planck Institutes: CBG & PKS

Netherlands
   Yiteng's PhD thesis (2020) - PDF   

Yiteng was our lab's first PhD student. He submitted his thesis in December 2019 and defended in August 2020 (delayed due to COVID-19). Afterwards, he became an ELBE postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institutes for Cell Biology and Genetics and for Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany.

Self intro by Yiteng (written when he joined our lab in 2015):
How does a theoretical physicist end up in a biology-related lab where he works with pipettes, Eppendorfer tubes, yeast plates and a big experimental apparatus that often gives surprises (not always in the positive sense)? Looking back at my journey to this lab, I would almost believe that joining this lab was a random event. Just as in the cell many things work by diffusion, Brownian motion and other inherently random processes, I drifted around various fields ranging from pure mathematics to condensed matter physics before arriving at my current field of study: systems biology, quantitative biology or whatever name is suitable. Randomness can be very valuable: something happening spontaneously might give surprising and interesting results. The fact that life exists might be due to nothing else than randomness. Or imagine how boring the world would be if everything was predictable. The bottom line is that joining this lab in Delft was not something I planned beforehand, but that makes it all the more exciting!


Yiteng's publications from our lab:

Y. Dang, D. A. J. Grundel & H. Youk
Cellular dialogues: cell-cell communication through diffusible molecules yields dynamic spatial patterns
Cell Systems (Research Artcle) 10:1-17 (January 2020)
   Online version (.html)       Article in PDF       Supp. Figures (.pdf)       Supp. Text (.pdf)       Supp. Movies (.html)   


E. P. Olimpio*, Y. Dang* & H. Youk - (*Co-first authors)
Statistical dynamics of spatial-order formation by communicating cells
iScience (Research Article) 2: 27-40 (April 2018)
   Online version (.html)       research article + Supp. Info (.pdf)