Dr. Yan Peng received her M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from Beijing Medical University (BMU), China in 1986 and 1991, respectively. She completed Pediatric Residency/Chief Resident at BMU and practiced there as a Pediatric Nephrologist till 1993.  After a combined six years of basic research on kidney disease at Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN and UT-Southwestern Medical Center (UTSW), Dallas, TX, she went to University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) for her Pathology Residency in 1999. Upon the completion, she took two one-year fellowship trainings in Breast and Gynecologic Pathology at UPMC and Cytopathology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School in Boston, respectively. In 2005, she joined the faculty of the Department of Pathology at UTSW, where she has been practicing Surgical Pathology and Cytopathology till now. She is certified in Anatomic Pathology, Clinical Pathology, and Cytopathology by the American Board of Pathology.

Currently she is an UTSW dedicated Breast Pathologist; a Pathology Consultant for the UTSW weekly Multidisciplinary Breast Cancer Conference and Multidisplinary Gynecologic Oncology Tumor Board; an active member of UTSW Breast Care Executive Committee and Breast Disease Oriented Team of Simmons Cancer Center of UTSW; an active member of UTSW University Hospital Cancer Committee. She has been a co-investigator and active participant in several National Cancer Institute (NCI) breast cancer clinical trials. She is Medical Directors of Diagnostic Immunohistochemistry Laboratory and Tumor Biomarker Image and In Situ Hybridization Analysis Laboratory at UTSW Physician Pathologist Leadership Team for Parkland Health & Hospital System. She was elected to be Faculty Senator by UTSW pathology faculty in 2011.

She has authored and co-authored about 60 published scientific articles, book chapters, and case reports, mainly in the fields of Breast and Gynecologic Pathology, Diagnostic Immunohistochemistry, and Cytopathology. Three of the published articles on breast cancer were selected to be CME/SAM articles by the editorial board of American Journal of Clinical Pathology. She has given multiple invited lectures/presentations on triple-negative breast cancer, a newly classified molecular subtype of breast cancer, and its potential prognostic tumor biomarkers nationally and internationally. She is an active Topic Team Member of Education Best Practices Team of American Society for Clinical Pathology (ASCP), and is responsible for reviewing and grading abstracts and course proposals for the ASCP Annual Meetings and for making recommendations and providing inputs to the Annual Meeting’s Steering Committee.

Her specialties include Breast Cancer and Gynecologic Cancer Pathology, Cytopathology, Diagnostic Immunohistochemistry with a special interest in unknown primary cancer work-up, and prognostic tumor biomarker testing by image analysis and FISH.