Dr. Yanucil is CTO of Alpha-Young. Prior to that he was a post-doc in Dr. Christian Faul’s laboratory at the University of Alabama.  His doctoral training was in the Cell, Molecular and, Developmental Biology (CMDB) program at UAB. Chris received his undergraduate training at the Ursinus College in Collegeville, PA. Before joining graduate school, Chris worked in the pharmaceutical industry, including Merck. Chris’ PhD thesis project focused on studying the crosstalk between FGF23 and klotho in the regulation of signal transduction and cardiac remodeling. He has developed a protocol to purify recombinant klotho protein as well as an assay to detect bioactive klotho in solution. Furthermore, Chris studied the role of FGF21 in diabetic cardiomyopathy. He has been supported by an F31 fellowship from the NIH/NIDDK. To date, Chris has published eight peer-reviewed articles with Dr. Faul, and he gave oral and poster presentations about his thesis project at several conferences, including the Kidney Week of the American Society of Nephrology (ASN), the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) and Gordon Research Conferences (GRC).