Yijie Geng, PhD

Dr. Yijie Geng is Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental & Occupational Health Sciences at the University of Washington School of Public Health. In March 2026, he was appointed as the Sheldon D. Murphy Endowed Chair in Toxicology and Environmental Health. He received his BS in biological sciences and bioengineering from Tsinghua University and his PhD in cell and developmental biology from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He completed his post-doctoral research at Harvard and University of Utah, focusing on using chemical biology and machine learning to study environmental impacts on social behavior.

Dr. Geng is broadly interested in elucidating the molecular basis of social behavior in health and diseases. In particular, a current focus of the Geng lab is to understand how environmental factors influence social behavior and its related mental illnesses such as autism spectrum disorder. His work integrates model organisms (zebrafish and rodents), chemical biology (high-throughput chemical screening) and toxicology, machine learning, genetics, neuroscience, and translational medicine, with the goal of introducing a new research paradigm into the field of environmental toxicology for mental illnesses.