Yong has a broad background in mass spectrometry-based proteomics and biomarker discovery in diseases. As a postdoctoral fellow at University of Washington, he carried out researches on molecular pathogenesis of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases, and produced several peer-reviewed publications on α-synuclein-binding proteins, neurodegeneration-induced microglial activation and CSF proteome. At Institute for Systems Biology, Yong expanded his research to include measures of disease-induced changes in post-translational modification sub-proteomes (e.g. glycoproteome and phosphoproteome), and developed effective and highly reproducible blood sample preparation procedures for large-scale biomarker discovery in the blood. Both global profiling and targeted proteomics approach have been applied in multiple projects involving several brain diseases, e.g. PD, AD, TBI and PTSD and other types of disease like preterm birth, drug-induced liver toxicity and steatosis, toxoplasmosis and Lyme, etc.