Yasmeen Ajaj

Yasmeen (Yaz) is a 5th year Genetics PhD candidate in the Jun Lu lab at the Yale Stem Cell Center. Her thesis work addresses the fundamental questions: "why do neutrophils have a non-spherical nuclear morphology, and what is the mechanism driving this curious phenomenon?" With such a philosophical and broad question, she has acquired a vast and ever-growing array of skills, such as in vivo and in vitro experiments, expansion microscopy, time-lapse imaging, volumetric electron microscopy, flow cytometry, and molecular cloning.

She holds a B.S. in Molecular Biology from UC San Diego. During her undergraduate education, she worked as an Immunology intern at Takeda Pharmaceuticals for over two years, driving pre-clinical research for gastrointestinal therapeutics. Concurrently, she conducted research in the Jens Lykke-Anderson Lab, working to characterize the functions and substrate specificities of three putative eukaryotic deadenylases. After graduating from UCSD, she spent two years as a postbac in the lab of Robert Crouch at the NIH, characterizing the pathophysiology of a mouse mouse model of Aicardi-Goutières Syndrome, a neuroencephalopathy caused by mutation in RNase H.

Yasmeen is passionate about Life Sciences entrepreneurship, being involved with Yale Ventures as a Canaan Fellow and as a Blavatnik Associate, and with Health Innovation Capital as a Scientific Venture Fellow. She also enjoys offering consulting services to biotech, pharmacuetical, and non-scientific companies.

In her free time, Yasmeen enjoys boating along the CT coastline, skiing, traveling, concert-going, finding new horror flicks, co-managing a med spa with her husband, and learning how to golf.