Wenyan Sun, PhD
Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery, Clinical Neuroscience Research Center
Biography
Dr. Sun earned her Ph.D. from Xi’an Jiaotong University, China. She then conducted her postdoctoral work and served as an Instructor/Researcher at the UT Health San Antonio in the laboratory of Dr. Bess Frost from 2016 to 2021. During this time, she discovered that aberrant transposable element activation, induced by the dysregulation of small non-coding piRNAs, plays a role in Alzheimer’s disease and related tauopathies. In 2022, Dr. Sun joined the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) as a Senior Research Associate and later became a Research Assistant Professor, where she expanded her research to study how brain acid signaling affects post-stroke cognitive impairment and to pursue new drug discovery. She has been awarded the BrightFocus Postdoctoral Fellowship and the AHA Career Development Award.
