Yvonne began her research career in Bing Lim’s lab at the Genome Institute of Singapore, where she studied miRNA function and mechanisms of action (Tay et al, Nature 2008). She then pursued her postdoctoral training in the Pandolfi lab at Harvard Medical School, where she investigated how transcripts can co-regulate each other by competing for shared miRNAs (Tay et al, Cell 2011). Now based at the Cancer Science Institute of Singapore and National University of Singapore, Yvonne’s research group studies non-coding RNAs as well as the non-coding regions of protein-coding mRNAs (untranslated regions, UTRs; Chan et al, Nat Cell Biol 2022). As many mRNA populations comprise transcripts with different UTRs (Li et al, Cell Genom 2024), and these UTRs control key processes such as stability, localization and transport, a better understanding of their function may lead to breakthroughs in our understanding of key cancer genes and the identification of previously uncharacterized therapeutic vulnerabilities in cancer cells.