Yanghua "Sunny" He, Ph.D.

Yanghua He, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor (tenure-track) in the Department of Human Nutrition, Food and Animal Sciences at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (UHM). She has been working on animal genomics and epigenomics for decades, focusing her research on improving animal economic traits and revealing mechanisms of animal and human diseases. She obtained her Ph.D. in Animal Genetics at China Agricultural University, Beijing in 2012. Then she worked as a Research Associate at the University of Maryland where she continued to study genetic and epigenetic mechanisms of animal and human diseases including chicken Marek’s Disease, Systems Biology of grass-fed beef cattle, and human lung cancer. Therefore, she has gained extensive experience in the work from Phenotypes to Genotype Profiling. In 2017, she switched her job to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, as a Research Fellow, focusing on the work from Genotyping to Function, particularly exploring potential regulatory elements for Sickle Cell Disease (SCD) using Big Data and bioinformatics tools, and validating these elements using CRISPR-Cas9 (Epi-)Genome Editing strategies to discover causal genetic marks of SCD. In 2019, she was recruited to the UH Manoa where she has been teaching genetics-related courses and some introductory courses in the Animal Science program. She is also an affiliated faculty in Food Science, Human Nutrition, and Molecular Biosciences and Bioengineering (MBBE) programs. Her research has been primarily focused on the impacts of environmental factors on animal and human health. Since Hawai’i’s climate is extremely diverse, with 10 of the world’s 14 climate zones from tropical rainforest to desert and tundra, one research program in her lab is studying the impacts of climate change on beef cattle production, aimed to identify adaptive alleles and regulatory variants related to climate variability in beef cattle for selecting and breeding of climatically resilient cattle and potentially engineering the genome of beef cattle to adapt to warming climates. The other research program in her lab is studying how water conditions impact the production and health of Pacific White Shrimp (Litopenaeus Vannamei) and the mechanisms of the White Spot Syndrome Virus (WSSV) infection. 

Dr. He is a mom with two daughters, Annie (11 years) and Maxima (8 years). She likes hiking, tennis, basketball, skating, and singing in her spare time.