Yanling Wang, M.D., Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Department of Neurological Sciences at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. She is Principal Investigator of the Human Cell Modeling Group and Director of the RADC Sequencing Core at the Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Center.
Dr. Wang earned her M.D. and Ph.D. in Pediatrics and Neuroscience from Shandong University School of Medicine, followed by fellowship and postdoctoral training in neuroscience and developmental biology at the University of California, San Francisco, where she studied epilepsy, stem cell biology, and brain development. She then joined the Allen Institute for Brain Science as a Group Leader in Stem Cell Biology, pioneering efforts to map human cell types and lineage relationships using stem cell–based models and single-cell RNA sequencing.
Since 2017, Dr. Wang has been on the faculty at Rush, where she founded and built the Human Cell Modeling Group at the Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Center from the ground up. She leads a multidisciplinary team investigating Alzheimer’s disease mechanisms with a particular focus on border immunity and pathology-associated processes, leveraging iPSC-derived models and single-cell multi-omic approaches. She also built the RADC Sequencing Core into a premier facility, enabling high-quality RNA sequencing and spatial multi-omic studies on deeply phenotyped postmortem human brain samples.
A major focus of Dr. Wang’s research is neuroinflammation, especially the role of brain border immunity in aging and neurodegeneration. Her team published the first single-cell RNA-seq atlas of human meningeal tissue (Kearns et al., Nature Communications, 2023), revealing diverse macrophage populations that both overlap with and diverge from microglial gene programs. Her group is also deeply interested in neuropathology–glial interactions in the human brain. By applying spatial transcriptomics (ST) and immunohistochemistry (IHC) to postmortem AD brains, they produced one of the first human spatial transcriptomic maps of AD brain (Avey et al., Molecular Neurodegeneration Advances, 2025), identifying plaque-associated immune niches. They further demonstrated that iPSC-derived microglia exposed to amyloid-β recapitulate immune-response signatures observed in AD tissue.
Dr. Wang has obtained multiple NIH R01 grants and funding from the Paul M. Angell Family Foundation. She has authored 60 peer-reviewed publications spanning neurodegeneration, Alzheimer’s disease, stem cell biology, and developmental biology. She is a standing member of the NIH Genomics, Computational Biology, and Technology Study Section, serves as an ad hoc reviewer for multiple NIH study sections, and reviews for leading journals including Cell Stem Cell, Journal of Neuroscience, Journal of Neuroinflammation, Stem Cell Reports, and Molecular Neurodegeneration.