Dr. Kelley Yan is a physician-scientist at Columbia University Irving Medical Center who is a practicing gastroenterologist renowned for her contributions to our understanding of adult stem cell biology and tissue regeneration in the gut.

Kelley received her AB degree in Chemistry from Wellesley College then completed her MD and PhD degrees in the Medical Scientist Training Program at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Her PhD studies in Structural Biology, using NMR spectroscopy to determine 3D structures and functions of proteins, were productive and resulted numerous high-profile publications in Nature, Nature Structural Biology, and Molecular Cell. Kelley completed her Internal Medicine residency and Gastroenterology fellowship at Stanford University. There she also pursued postdoctoral research in Dr. Calvin Kuo’s lab focused on intestinal stem cell (ISC) biology.

Kelley launched her independent laboratory in 2016 and developed a research program studying ISC biology and tissue regeneration at the molecular, cellular, and tissue level. Kelley’s research has advanced our understanding of ISCs, the stem cell niche, and the signals that regulate cell fate in the gut epithelium. Her research on ISCs has been published in high-profile journals including Nature, Cell, Science, and Cell Stem Cell. Her group at Columbia recently discovered a novel population of ISCs that is upstream of the previously described stem/progenitors in the intestinal epithelium using genetic lineage tracing in mice. These findings were published in Cell and revise the lineage hierarchy and the stem cell model for the gut epithelium. She is the recipient of numerous accolades and awards including the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine MD Scholars Award, Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award for Medical Scientists, the 2020 NIH Director’s New Innovator (DP2) award, and the 2022 AGA Young Investigator Award.