Yao is a Graduate Student pursuing a Ph.D. in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics in the Department of Quantitative and Computational Biology. He received a B.S. in Informatics and a M.S. in Bioinformatics from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. During his undergraduate and master, Yao worked on reconstructing tumor phylogeny tree under the supervision of Yuanfang Guan, Ph.D. Then he moved to the group of Lana Garmire at the University of Michigan, where he worked on a project regarding drug repositioning.