Yi Ren

Yi Ren, Ph.D.

Professor

Guangzhou Medical University, China

About the Speaker:

Yi Ren is selected for the National High-level Talent Program (Torch Program of the Ministry of Science and Technology), a distinguished talent of Nanshan Scholars at Guangzhou Medical University. Former tenured full professor, distinguished professor in neuroinflammation and Neuroimmunology at the College of Medicine, Florida State University; recipient of the Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship. She has long been dedicated to research in the field of neural injury and repair. Her team focuses on the interaction between myelin debris and phagocytic cells after spinal cord injury and its impact on the spinal cord microenvironment and functional recovery. Her work has been consistently funded by NIH, NSF, and multiple foundations. Her researches have been published in top international journals such as Nature Neuroscience, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Journal of Experimental Medicine, and Cancer Research. She has authored over 100 SCI-indexed papers, with Google Scholar citations exceeding 9,400 times (H-index 47).

Research Interest

Neuroinflammation

Spinal cord injury     

CNS trauma   

Neurodegeneration   

Myelin debris     

Phagocytes       

Pathogenic phagocytosis

Selected Recent Publications:

1. Fukuda M, Lin G, Liu Y, Hammel G, Kizer A, Ayazi M, Joshi S, Liu Y, Ren Y, Guan JJ (2025) Development of Engineered Microparticles for Investigating Enzymatic Degradation of Proteins and Peptides within Phagosomes. ACS Appl Mater Interfaces 17:13617-13631.

2. Mao H, Kuang Y, Feng D, Chen X, Lu L, Xia W, Gan T, Huang W, Guo W, Yi H, Yang Y, Wu Z, Dai W, Sun H, Wu J, Zhang R, Zhang S, Lin X, Yong Y, Yang X et al. (2024) Ultrasensitive detection of aggregated α-synuclein using quiescent seed amplification assay for the diagnosis of Parkinson's disease. Transl Neurodegener 13:35.

3. Wang X, Cheng ZJ, Tai WJ, Shi MJ, Ayazi M, Liu Y, Sun L, Yu CY, Fan ZM, Guo B, He XJ, Sun DM, Young W, Ren Y (2024) Targeting foamy macrophages by manipulating ABCA1 expression to facilitate lesion healing in the injured spinal cord. Brain Behav Immun 119:431-453.

4. Liu C, Chen XC, Liu Y, Sun L, Yu ZB, Ren Y, Zeng CC, Li Y (2023) Engineering Extracellular Matrix-Bound Nanovesicles Secreted by Three-Dimensional Human Mesenchymal Stem Cells. Adv Healthc Mater 12:e2301112.

5. Cheng WH, Kim S, Zivkovic S, Chung H, Ren Y, Guan JJ (2022) Specific labelling of phagosome-derived vesicles in macrophages with a membrane dye delivered with microfabricated microparticles. Acta Biomater 141:344-353.