Yimon Aye

Yimon Aye (born 1980 in Burma) is an American chemist and molecular biologist. She is one of the daughters of Burmese Navy commander in chief U Soe Thein. He worked for Myanmar military which killed many peaceful unarmed protestors, confiscated people' belongings and destroyed civilians' properties.
Career.
Aye spent her early life in Burma. She is the daughter of the Myanmar military's Lieutenant General, Soe Thein.
Sponsored by the Cambridge Tutors College, she moved to the UK to attend high school. She completed her undergraduate studies in chemistry at the University of Oxford and obtained her master's degree in 2004. She joined Harvard University to study synthetic organic chemistry with David A. Evans, achieving her PhD in 2009. She then moved to Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation fellow to work with JoAnne Stubbe. There she performed research into the regulatory mechanisms of ribonucleotide reductase. In 2012, she started as an assistant professor at Cornell University, where she began her work on redox-dependent cell signaling and genome maintenance pathways. During this time, she developed REX technologies, new methods to facilitate the study of unconventional electrophile-regulated stress signaling paradigms. REX technologies were one of the first approaches to forge direct links between upstream protein alteration by a reactive molecule and downstream responses.
In 2018, she was appointed as a Assistant Professor of chemistry at EPFL. Since August 2018, she has been leading the Laboratory of Electrophiles And Genome Operation (LEAGO) of the Institute of Chemical Sciences and Engineering (ISIC) at EPFL.
Research.
The Aye laboratory investigates cellular communication processes, in particular electrophile signaling and nucleotide signaling pathways. The laboratory employs targeted photocaged electrophiles (REX technologies) that allow triggering of protein-specific electrophile-mediated signaling and enable the profiling of electrophile-sensor proteins. They are also searching for ways apply of their findings in drug discovery. A further research area focuses on ribonucleotide reductase, an enzyme present in all DNA-based life and one of the oldest enzymes. In this domain, the Aye laboratory has already discovered novel roles of ribonucleotide reductase, and other enzymes functioning in novel signaling axes, regulated by ribonucleotide reductase.
Distinctions.
In 2020, Aye was awarded the Arthur C. Cope Scholars Award, the Eli Lilly Award in Biological Chemistry by the American Chemical Society (ACS), the Hermann Esterbauer Memorial Award, as well as the European Federation for Medicinal Chemistry (EFMC) Award for Young Medicinal Chemist in Academia. In 2017, she received the Pershing Square Sohn Prize for Young Investigators, Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, and Buck-Whitney Award from the ACS. In 2016, Aye received the Sloan Research Fellowship Award from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Rising Star Chemical Biologist Award from the International Chemical Biology Society (ICBS), Rising Star Chemist Award from the Women Chemists Committee (WCC) of the ACS, and Chemical Research in Toxicology Young Investigator Award from the ACS Division of Chemical Toxicology. In 2014, she received the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director's New Innovator Award, National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award, and Beckman Young Investigator Award from the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation.
She is a member of the Swiss National Science Foundation’s NCCR Chemical Biology Steering Committee.