Yifei has had a longstanding interest in neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease and vascular dementia, since her graduate training in non-coding RNA regulation at Peking University. During her Ph.D. studies, she conducted research visits in the laboratory of Kepeng Wang at UConn Health and in the laboratory of Joseph Gogos at Columbia University. In 2018, she joined the laboratory of Jaime Grutzendler in the Department of Neurology at Yale University, where her research focused on neuron–glia pathology in neurodegeneration and the development of proteomic and iPSC-based tools to study axon–myelin pathology. In 2024, she visited the group of Evangelia Petsalaki at the European Bioinformatics Institute as an EMBL-EBI CPP Fellow. In 2026, Yifei Cai joined the Bio-X Institute at Shanghai Jiao Tong University as a Tenure-Track Associate Professor. Her work has been recognized through multiple international awards and research grants, including the BrightFocus Alzheimer’s Disease Standard Award, the Alzheimer’s Association Research Fellowship, and the Carol and Gene Ludwig Foundation Pilot Project Award.