Professor Yuan obtained the Ph.D. degree from The National University of Singapore in 2004. During her Ph.D. training, she was appointed as a Visiting Research Fellow and worked in the Department of Pathology in Brigham & Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, USA in 2001. Thereafter, she was a Research Associate in the Department of Molecular Biology in Princeton University from 2004 to 2006 and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Genome Institute of Singapore from 2006 to 2010. In 2010, she was appointed as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical Pathology and the Li Ka Shing Institute of Health Sciences, The Chinese University of Hong Kong.