Yiheng comes from Wuhan, Hubei, China. He received his bachelor degree in Polymer Materials and Engineering in Tsinghua University, Beijing. For his bachelor thesis, he studied the micro-crystal structure and rheological property of supramolecular polymer networks. Currently he is pursuing his Ph. D. at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, University of Chicago. Under the guidance of Professor de Pablo and Professor Sosnick, he is working on development of coarse-grained RNA model. In his leisure time, Yiheng enjoys going to concerts, playing trumpet in the orchestra and singing tenor in an A cappella group.
Yiheng's research is mainly focused on coarse-grained force field development of RNA. He applies the contrastive divergence method to train the coarse-grained force field on crystal structures and thermodynamic data of RNA, so as to get an accurate and well-balanced force field. Yiheng also works on simulations of nucleosome arrays incorporating post-translational modifications.