Yee Hoon Foong is a senior Computational Biology Postdoctoral Fellow in the Fine Lab at Weill Cornell Medicine. She earned her B.S. in Molecular Biology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she conducted honors thesis research on collagen remodeling in ovarian cancer cell lines. She completed her Ph.D. in Genetics and Epigenetics at the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation focused on investigating the catalytic and non-catalytic functions of the Tet1 epigenetic enzyme in the adult mouse cortex. In her doctoral work, she combined hands-on benchwork with advanced computational analysis to analyze high-throughput RNA-Seq, DNA methylation, and lipidomic datasets.
Prior to joining Weill Cornell, Yee Hoon completed a postdoctoral fellowship at NYU Langone Health, where she leveraged bioinformatics pipelines to integrate high-dimensional spatial transcriptomics, multiplexed imaging, and epigenetics. Her research focused on characterizing the immunological microenvironments of diverse human cancers and inferring copy number variants (CNVs) to identify distinct tumor subclones.
At the Fine Lab, she focuses on glioblastoma (GBM), leading an in silico Agent-based modeling (ABM) project to simulate and predict glioma cell state transitions, calcium signaling, interactions with immune cells, response to irradiation therapy, and emergent stress-resistant swarm behavior within the GLICO (Glioma Cerebral Organoid) model. Her work aims to parameterize these models to predict how glioma cells adapt to microenvironmental cues and identify key therapeutic interventions to disrupt tumor network coordination.