Yimon Aye: Crossing Borders with Chemical Biology

I grew up in Burma at a time when the universities were shut for a decade, so I was forced to seek my higher education abroad. I was fortunate to receive scholarships that made it possible for me to do high-school and undergraduate studies in the UK. I read chemistry at Oxford (UK) for 4 years and in 2009 I received my PhD degree in organic chemistry with Professor Dave Evans at Harvard (USA). After a decade-long training period in chemistry, I decided to switch fields and learned the ropes of biochemistry from the ground up, as I began my postdoc training with Professor JoAnne Stubbe at MIT. In mid-2012, I established my independent laboratory and our formative years were spent at Cornell (Ithaca) before we were competitively recruited by EPFL (Switzerland) on a tenured position in chemical biology. In August 2018, my team members and I established the Laboratory of Electrophiles and Genome Operation (LEAGO) at EPFL