Draft:John Yin

• Comment: Based upon his citation record he is far from meeting WP:NPROF. Just having a chair with the term "Distinguished" in it is not enough. All his external awards are junior, and there is no evidence of major external peer awards. It is WP:TOOSOON by many years. Ldm1954 (talk) 12:54, 6 April 2026 (UTC)

• Comment: In accordance with the Wikimedia Foundation's Terms of Use, I disclose that I have been paid by my employer for my contributions to this article. Claire.massey (talk) 16:08, 10 October 2025 (UTC)

John Yin is a Chinese American chemical engineer and systems biologist. He is a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) during the Clinton administration. Yin is currently a Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering and a founding faculty member of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Yin was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1960.^[1] At Columbia University, he earned bachelor of arts and science degrees from Columbia College in 1982 and Columbia Engineering in 1983, respectively.^[2]

Yin completed his Ph.D. in chemical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley in 1988 mentored by Harvey Blanch, and then conducted postdoctoral research at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, with Manfred Eigen.^{[1] [3]}

Yin began his career in 1992 as an assistant professor at the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College, where he led the development of a visual method to track virus evolution in the lab, showing that beneficial mutations change how virus populations grow, spread and evolve.^[4] In 1998, he joined the University of Wisconsin–Madison as a professor of chemical and biological engineering. There, Yin developed drugs that resist virus escape,^[5] advanced new methods to characterize anti-viral drugs,^[6] studied diverse behaviors of individual cells in response to virus infection, and researched the anti-viral functions of infection byproducts.^[7] During the pandemic, Yin co-organized a National Science Foundation workshop on Predictive Intelligence for Pandemic Prevention ^[8] and contributed to the COVID Information Commons to facilitate knowledge-sharing and collaboration across various COVID research efforts.^[9]

Yin has also studied the chemical origins of life, experimentally exploring how the environment can impact the emergence of molecular information,^[10] how wet-dry cycling can promote the formation of biological polymers,^[11] and how such processes might ultimately guide the development of new therapeutics for human health.^[12]

Yin was one of five founding faculty of a University of Wisconsin-Madison hub for interdisciplinary research, the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery.^[13] There he advanced programs linking the humanities, the arts, and the sciences, including Virulent, a video game for kids to learn about how viruses hijack living cells,^[14] the Emerging Interfaces Award, for graduate students bridging humanities and science,^[15] and the Kohler Fellows Program, sponsoring collaborative projects in science-art fusion.^[16]

Yin has been recognized by several awards and honors:

• National Science Foundation, Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) (1996), during the Clinton administration^[17]

• Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professorship, University of Wisconsin–Madison^[18]

• Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship, 1988-1990 (Germany)^[19]

• National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award^[20]

• Founding Five Faculty, Wisconsin Institute for Discovery (2010)^[13]

Category:1960 births Category:Living people Category:Columbia College, Columbia University alumni Category:Dartmouth College faculty Category:UC Berkeley College of Engineering alumni Category:University of Wisconsin–Madison faculty Category:Scientists from Boston Category: Columbia School of Engineering and Applied Science alumni