Yvon Woappi '11

Yvon Woappi ’11, holds a doctoral degree in biomedical sciences and is an instructor at Harvard Medical School. To get where he is today, he said that the mentorship he received as an undergraduate at Pitt-Bradford was critical.

“I think my work with Dr. Om Singh at Pitt-Bradford was probably 60% to 80% of why I became a Ph.D. scientist. A big part is getting that confidence that you can do science,” Woappi said.

As an undergraduate, Woappi researched and published with Singh.

Woappi said, “To this day, people are quite impressed that I was publishing as an undergraduate. It is not typical.”

That early experience is one reason Woappi prioritizes mentoring young researchers in the lab, and he’s very close to starting his own lab, having finished his post-doctoral fellowship (which is like a medical doctor’s residency) at Harvard and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

The world of academic research science has its own proscribed paths. Each university lab is led by a principal investigator, who designs and runs experiments and manages their own lab. Managing a lab includes applying for funding and hiring people to work in their lab.

Sometimes lab workers are graduate students who develop related experiments to run and report on. Other times they are researchers whose work is focused on the principal investigator’s research. One thing Woappi will need to consider is what universities have programs with researchers who will be most useful in conducting the kind of research that he wants to pursue.

In January 2021, Woappi received a huge vote of confidence from the National Institutes of Health when it named him one of seven inaugural K99/R00 MOSAIC scholars.

The program is meant to help promising diverse researchers transition into their own careers at research institutions such as universities or affiliated research hospitals like Brigham and Women’s. The MOSAIC program will provide Woappi five years of mentored career development, research support, and a $1 million, five-year grant to set up his own lab. One critical aspect of the grant is that Woappi can take it with him to whatever institution offers him an assistant professorship with a lab.

This academic year, Woappi is an instructor at Harvard Medical School, which is usually a transitory position between completing doctoral training and starting a tenure-track position as an assistant professor. By next year, he should have his own lab at Harvard or somewhere else.

Woappi’s path has been classically academic. After Pitt-Bradford, he earned his doctorate in biomedical sciences at the University of South Carolina, where he studied how some viruses, like human papillomavirus, cause cancer. The model for studying this was skin, which led Woappi to an interest in dermatology, which he pursued at Harvard.

He is now studying skin biology and viral oncology and examining how to regenerate tissue. In 2019, he was selected as a Rising Star in Biomedical Sciences by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cornell University and Columbia University.

And he recently added a new title – Dad. “It’s one of the most interesting and dynamic times of my life,” he said, “launching a lab and becoming a father for the first time.”