Xiangzhong "Jerry" Yang (; July 1959 – 5 February 2009) was a Chinese-American

biotechnology Biotechnology is a multidisciplinary field that involves the integration of natural sciences and Engineering Science, engineering sciences in order to achieve the application of organisms and parts thereof for products and services. Specialists ...

scientist, and

stem cell In multicellular organisms, stem cells are undifferentiated or partially differentiated cells that can change into various types of cells and proliferate indefinitely to produce more of the same stem cell. They are the earliest type of cell ...

research advocate. In 1999 he was credited with creating the first cloned farm animal in the United States – a cow called "Amy".Xiangzhong (Jerry) Yang
UConn faculty member profile Born on July 31, 1959, and raised in Wei County,

Handan Handan is a prefecture-level city located in the southwest of Hebei province, China. The southernmost prefecture-level city of the province, it borders Xingtai on the north, and the provinces of Shanxi on the west, Henan on the south and Shando ...

Hebei Hebei is a Provinces of China, province in North China. It is China's List of Chinese administrative divisions by population, sixth-most populous province, with a population of over 75 million people. Shijiazhuang is the capital city. It bor ...

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...

, Yang attended Beijing Agricultural University (currently

China Agricultural University China Agricultural University (CAU) is a public university in Haidian, Beijing, China. The university is affiliated with the Ministry of Education of China. It is part of Project 211, Project 985, and the Double First-Class Construction. The un ...

). Upon graduation, he took the entrance exam for graduate study and ranked number one among all applicants in his field. He was therefore awarded a prestigious scholarship from the Ministry of Agriculture to study in the US. He emigrated to the United States in 1983 where he received his PhD under Robert Foote in 1991. Yang became a research faculty member at

Cornell University Cornell University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university based in Ithaca, New York, United States. The university was co-founded by American philanthropist Ezra Cornell and historian and educator Andrew Dickson W ...

and received multiple grants from the Cornell Biotechnology Center and Easter AI (Genex; http://genex.crinet.com/). In 1996 he joined the faculty at the

University of Connecticut The University of Connecticut (UConn) is a public land-grant research university system with its main campus in Storrs, Connecticut, United States. It was founded in 1881 as the Storrs Agricultural School, named after two benefactors. In 1893, ...

as an associate professor, and in 2001, was appointed founding director of the University's Center for Regenerative Biology. In November 2017 Yang was honored with the naming of the street that leads to the University of Connecticut Dairy Bar from Route 195 as Jerry Yang Road. That same road is the location of the Agricultural Biotechnology Laboratory, where Yang performed countless hours of research that brought international fame to the Universit
University Honors Memory of Research Great Jerry Yang
In 1996 Yang was first diagnosed with salivary gland adenocarcinoma, a condition that would eventually claim his life. On February 5, 2009, he died at the

Brigham and Women's Hospital Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH or The Brigham) is a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School and the largest hospital in the Longwood Medical Area in Boston, Massachusetts. Along with Massachusetts General Hospital, it is one of the two ...

Boston, Massachusetts Boston is the capital and most populous city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the United States. The city serves as the cultural and Financial centre, financial center of New England, a region of the Northeas ...

, aged 49. An obituary was published by the scientific magazine ''

Nature Nature is an inherent character or constitution, particularly of the Ecosphere (planetary), ecosphere or the universe as a whole. In this general sense nature refers to the Scientific law, laws, elements and phenomenon, phenomena of the physic ...

''.

References

1959 births 2009 deaths Deaths from cancer in Massachusetts Cornell University alumni Deaths from oral cancer in the United States Educators from Hebei University of Connecticut faculty Chinese emigrants to the United States 20th-century Chinese biologists 20th-century American biologists 21st-century Chinese biologists {{China-scientist-stub