Wang Yanyi

Wang Yanyi (; born 1981), is a Chinese immunologist and virologist. Since 2018, she became the director general at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the deputy director for Wuhan in the China Zhi Gong Party. Wang earned her Bachelor's degree at the Peking University in 2004. After graduating, she went to the University of Colorado for her master's degree. She is married to Shu Hongbing, a graduate of Emory University. In 2006, Wang worked as a lecturer at the University of Wuhan. She begin working on her thesis about pattern recognition signaling of the innate immune system as it relates to viruses, especially in regard to the Type 1 IFN system, which acts to alert the immune system to viral infection and in specific cases, overreact to the virus, causing lung inflammation and acute respiratory distress. Particularly her study involved the knockdown of WDR5 in order to see if it inhibited virus-triggered activation of IRF3 and NF-kappaB, as well as transcription of the IFNB1 gene, thereby lowering the immune response which could result in over-inflammation of the lungs and thus acute respiratory distress. Her findings in this study was that WDR5 is essential in assembling a virus-induced VISA-associated complex and in virus-triggered induction of type I IFNs. Wang completed her PhD in 2010, and then she began her work as an associate professor at the Wuhan University. In 2012, Wang started work as a researcher and team leader at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In December 2015, she became deputy director general at the Institute, and in 2018, became the director general of the Institute. Since her time at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Wang has continued her study of viral infections and their connection to immunological lung responses, which are often associated with diseases like SARS (a distant cousin infection to COVID-19). One important research paper published by her was with reference to Insulin-Like Growth Factor-1 (IGF) Signaling in cases of lung inflammation, such as with acute respiratory distress.