Yajing Wang, M.D., Ph.D., will join the UAB Department of Biomedical Engineering this summer as the director of basic and translational research and professor.

Wang comes to UAB from Thomas Jefferson University’s (TJU) Department of Emergency Medicine in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where she served as director of basic and translational research and associate professor.

Wang earned both her medical degree and master’s of science from the Shanxi Medical University in Taiyuan, China in 1999 and 2003, respectively, before earning a Ph.D. from the Shanghai Jiao Tong University Medical School in Shanghai in 2006. She completed postdoctoral training in Thomas Jefferson University’s cardiovascular program in 2010 and served as instructor before joining the faculty as assistant professor.

In 2022, Wang was named Expertscape’s World Expert in Adipokines. She has mentored a number of post-doctoral fellows since 2007 at TJU through a cardiovascular research program and, more recently, a summer scholarship program and course on advanced integrative physiology.

Wang’s research aims to examine the inter-organ communication between the cardiovascular system and fat in the process of cardiomyopathy. Her other research interests include the characterization of pathophysiological mechanisms that epigenetic elements facilitate in heart failure.