Yongyan is an undergraduate biology student at Tsinghua University, where she conducts research in Liu Lab. Her research interests revolve around the regulation of retrotransposon transcription and their roles in gene regulation. Currently, she is focusing on a project that investigates the molecular mechanism of Alu RNA regulation. Alu is a primate-specific SINE element and is the most active retrotransposon in the human genome, with over 1 million copies comprising about 10% of the genome. Yongyan is attending this course to deepen her understanding of current trends in epigenomics and to explore how retrotransposons can function as diverse regulatory elements.