THE team

Dr. Yang Cheng started his scientific career in immunology by investigating T cell immune responses in chronic viral infection and type 1 diabetes using LCMV model in the laboratory of Dr. Matthias von Herrath at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI) in San Diego, California. He shifted his research focus to understand human T cell immunity during chronic hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection while pursuing his Master’s degree under the mentorship of Prof. Mala Maini at University College London.

Dr. Cheng completed his Ph.D. and postdoctoral training with Dr. Evan Newell at Singapore Immunology Network (SIgN) of the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR). There, he spearheaded multiple research programs using highly multiplexed combinatorial peptide-MHC tetramer strategy and mass cytometry to comprehensively probed peripheral and intrahepatic virus-specific T cells in patients with chronic HBV infection or hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). His works contributed to the fundamental understanding of T cell exhaustion and memory responses during the progression of human chronic HBV infection, and identified novel HBV-specific memory T cells and HBV-reactive T cell receptors (TCR) linked to disease control. He moved to Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School as a staff scientist in 2020, where he extended his research interest to study the functional roles of virus-specific T cells in human papillomavirus (HPV)-associated cancers and their responses in immunotherapy.

In 2023, Dr. Cheng returned to his home country, Taiwan, to establish his independent research group as an Assistant Faculty Member at the Institute of Biomedical Sciences (IBMS), Academia Sinica. His research group aims to use various cutting-edge technologies to perform high quality in-depth analyses of antigen-specific T cell immunity in different types of human tissue samples. The main focus of Cheng Laboratory is to explore the functional relationship of tissue-resident memory T cells and the long-term immune protection in the context of human virus infection, vaccination, and virus-associated cancer