Hi!

My name is Min Ya (闵娅), and I go by Minya in English. Welcome!

I obtained my Ph.D. in Aug. 2021 at Harvard University, mentored by Prof. Elena Kramer. From 2021 to 2024, I have been a NSF Postdoc Fellow in Biology with Prof. Yaowu Yuan’s lab at the University of Connecticut.

I was born and raised in Chengdu, which is my favorite and undoubtedly the best (maybe subjective) city in China. I went to college at Sichuan University in Chengdu, and exchanged to Hokkaido University (Japan) in my junior year. During my time in Japan, I joined Prof. Fujita Tomomichi ‘s lab and this experience made me start to consider pursuing a career in academia. I love research, I love plants, and I love research on understanding plants!

After college, I was accepted to the Erasmus Mundus Master Programme in Evolutionary Biology (MEME), a EU-funded 2-year program joint between 4 European universities and Harvard University. I started my MEME journey at Uppsala University (Sweden), then moved to Université Montpellier 2 (France) where I worked with Prof. Eric Imbert, subsequently to Harvard University with Prof. Elena Kramer, and to Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (Germany) in my final semester to work with Prof. Susanne Renner at the Munich Botanic Garden. Upon completion, I obtained Dual M.S. Degree in Evolutionary Biology at Uppsala University and University of Montpellier II.

MEME has provided me with these unique opportunities to study at universities in different countries, with different cultures, and conduct research in different sub-fields of biology to find out where my real passion lies. That’s why it took me almost no time to make the decision to continue Ph.D. at the Kramer lab - I have already discovered floral evo-devo is my jam and I cannot ask for a better mentor than Elena!

Fast forward to our current timeline, I still love research, still love plants, and still love research on understanding plants! Plant evo-devo research is a perfect mixture of molecular lab work, computational analysis, and microscopy. It allows me to spend a lot of time with my plants, documenting their details at all levels, from macroscopic to microscopic, from genes to genomes.

Download my CV here!

What can you see in the lab logo? :)

It’s rainbow over setting sun on water. It’s L1 L2 L3 of meristems. It’s floral whorls. It’s organ arrangement in a flower. It’s things I love. Or, you can also see it as a logo for a “fake” yoga studio, where we try our best to enjoy the stretches, twists and turns in science, as well as the overwhelming joy that comes after.