Principal Investigator

Yimon Aye was born and raised in Burma and is a naturalized US citizen. She left her motherland upon receiving a full scholarship to attend Cambridge Tutors College, UK (high school equivalent), and subsequently read chemistry at Somerville College, University of Oxford, UK, as an international student scholar (2000-2004), supported by several scholarships from Somerville College alongside the Oxford Waverley Scholarship, the Open Society Foundations, and the British Council Burma Funds. Her undergraduate research was carried out with Prof. Stephen L. Buchwald (MIT, USA; summer 2023) and Prof. Stephen G. Davies (Oxford University, UK; master thesis in organic chemistry; 2003-24). Yimon then moved to Harvard University, USA, achieving a Ph.D. in organic chemistry under the guidance of Prof. David A. Evans. She subsequently moved to MIT (USA) to research the cellular and biochemical regulatory mechanisms of the enzyme ribonucleotide reductase with Prof. JoAnne Stubbe as a Damon Runyon Cancer Research Postdoctoral Fellow. Yimon established her independent laboratory in mid-2012. Her laboratory’s formative years were spent at Cornell University (USA) and EPFL (Switzerland). In 2024, Yimon returned to her undergraduate alma mater, Oxford Chemistry, as a Professor of Chemistry & Chemical Biology. When she began her own laboratory in 2012, Yimon set out to understand the detailed mechanisms of cellular communications choreographed by innate reactive (electrophilic) metabolites and related drugs. This impetus culminated in the development of “REX” technologies (T-REX delivery and G-REX profiling, and more recently, Localis-REX, a technology that enables function-guided proximity mapping of local proteome’s druggability). Her laboratory is most well-known for precision electrophile signaling studies. But they also study proteins/pathways involved in mammalian genome maintenance and signaling by endogenous nucleotides, including the mechanisms of anticancer and antiviral nucleotide therapeutics in clinical use. 

Yimon served as an Associate Editor of ACS Chemical Biology (2022-2024) prior to her recent appointment as Editor in Chief of Current Opinion in Chemical Biology. 

For a representative list of international honors and contributions made, both in the US and Europe by Aye and her team members, please visit Awards and Highlights.