Junying Yuan received her undergraduate degree from Fudan University, Shanghai, China, in 1982 and her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Harvard University in 1989. Dr. Yuan carried out her Ph.D. thesis work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the laboratory of H. R. Horvitz. She was first appointed as Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School in 1992, when she became a Principal Investigator of the Cardiovascular Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital. She joined the Department of Cell Biology in 1996 and was appointed a Professor of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School in 2000. In 2014, Dr. Yuan was appointed as Elizabeth D. Hay Professor of Cell Biology, a Professorship that honours the late Professor Elizabeth D. Hay, the first female full professor in the history of Harvard Medical School. Dr. Yuan returned to China in 2020 and joined Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry as the Director of Interdisciplinary Research Center on Biology and Chemistry.
Dr. Yuan is a pioneer in the cell death field. Her 256 published papers have been highly cited with collective citations of more than 120,000 times (H index 136). Dr. Yuan made transformative discoveries on apoptosis and necroptosis in mammalian cells. Her discovery of mammalian caspases led to a molecular era in apoptosis research. She used chemical biology to demonstrate the existence and significance of a regulated necrosis mechanism, termed necroptosis, in human inflammatory and neurodegenerative diseases and the role of RIPK1 as a key mediator of necroptosis. RIPK1 inhibitors, first discovered and described by Dr. Yuan, have been advanced into human clinical trials for the treatment of human inflammatory and neurodegenerative diseases worldwide. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences (US) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.