Jason Yi received his B.S. in biochemistry and molecular biology at Dickinson College and was an undergraduate research assistant in yeast genetics at the Fox Chase Cancer Center. He spent two years as a research associate in the drug discovery industry before completing his Ph.D. in pharmacology at Duke University. In the laboratory of Michael Ehlers at Duke, he studied how extrinsic factors direct neuronal migration and axon specification in the developing cortex.

Yi did his postdoctoral work in the laboratory of Mark Zylka at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). While at UNC, he discovered the master regulatory switch in UBE3A, an E3 ubiquitin ligase implicated in neurodevelopmental disorders. He showed how an autism-linked mutation affects this regulation, thereby providing a mechanistic model of how a single genetic mutation in UBE3A changes enzymatic behavior and contributes to pathology.

Yi established his laboratory in the Department of Neuroscience at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis in 2017. His laboratory seeks to identify pathways that underlie autism and neurodevelopmental disorders by leveraging genetic variants to dissect how candidate disease proteins are regulated within cells.