Yanghai Zhang is a fourth-year PhD student in the Animal Science Graduate Program and a member of Dr. Wei Guo’s lab. She recently served as a co-first author on a paper in the high-impact journal Circulation Research (5-year impact factor 20.8). The study, “Reducing Granules Without Splicing Restoration Alleviates RBM20 Cardiomyopathy,” demonstrates that alleviating pathological RNA/protein granules—independent of splicing rescue—can mitigate RBM20-mutation cardiomyopathy, highlighting a potential therapeutic avenue for patients who develop severe, early-onset dilated cardiomyopathy due to RBM20 variants.

Yanghai has co-authored 10 peer-reviewed publications, including three first-author papers, and is recognized among the first authors on the Circulation Research website. Read more: Article page — https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCRESAHA.124.324781; First-author recognition — https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/RES.0000000000000715.