Yeonwoo Park is a postdoctoral fellow who brings an evolutionary eye to molecular biology. In doctoral research at the University of Chicago with Joseph Thornton, Yeonwoo studied how epistasis and contingency shape the paths open to proteins as they evolve, showing that epistatic drift makes protein evolution gradually less predictable (Science, 2022) and that protein sequence–function relationships are, for the most part, simple (Nature Communications, 2024). Earlier work dealt with how mTORC1 balances the supply of amino acids with the demand for protein synthesis (Cell Reports, 2017) and with the cis-regulatory evolution of FOXO1 (Molecular Biology and Evolution, 2016).
In the lab, Yeonwoo studies how essential molecular interactions change over evolutionary time. In a 2026 Cell Systems paper with V. Narry Kim, Yeonwoo traced the interaction between primary microRNAs and their processing enzyme across 460 million years of vertebrate evolution, measuring the processing of more than a thousand ancestral and present-day primary microRNAs and all of their point mutants: the processing rate held steady while the molecular basis of the interaction kept drifting.
Education
- 2017–2022 Ph.D., The University of Chicago, USA
Publications with our lab
- The drifting biochemical basis of an essential molecular interaction
Cell Systems (2026)