Yixuan Ren is a PhD student in Professor Yawei Gao’s research group at Tongji University, collaborating with Professor Shaorong Gao’s team. Her research focuses on RNA epigenetic modifications and their regulatory roles in early embryonic development and stem cell pluripotency. Specifically, she is working on developing detection methods for RNA modifications, elucidating RNA-chromatin and RNA-RNA interaction networks and characterising small RNA-mediated chromatin regulation in development, disease, and ageing. Yixuan is honoured to be part of the workshop and looks forward to engaging with experts in retrotransposon biology, a field that complements her research.