Eric Hoyeon Song

Assistant Professor of Immunobiology and Ophthalmology & Visual Sciences, Yale University

Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship awarded in 2020 to pursue a PhD in Immunobiology and an MD in Medicine at Yale University.

Eric Hoyeon Song is an immigrant from South Korea.

About Eric Hoyeon Song

Eric Hoyeon Song was born in Seoul, South Korea and moved to California with his parents and younger brother when he was eight. He vividly remembers one of his first days of school in the United States, he walked into his classroom without speaking the language, and to add to the fear and awe, everyone was in bizarre costumes, it was Halloween. He still thinks about those feelings as he navigates new challenges and environments.

While Eric adjusted to a new country, his parents faced the financial and emotional hardships immigrants so often do. Their selfless and endless support gave him a wide breadth of experiences that fostered his love of the arts and sciences—something he is forever grateful for.

The teachers and mentors he met growing up shaped what he wanted to do with his own life. At the University of Southern California, he cofounded a nonprofit, Project L, and worked at Teach for America as a campus campaign coordinator. After a biochemistry degree at USC and a master's at Johns Hopkins, he developed drug delivery systems for brain tumors at Yale with Professor Mark Saltzman, then stayed to complete his MD and PhD. Working with his mentor Professor Akiko Iwasaki, Eric discovered how the immune system behaves differently in the brain and eye than in the rest of the body, shaped by the anatomy of those organs themselves. He launched his lab at Yale in 2022 and finished his residency in Ophthalmology, serving as chief resident in his final year.

Eric is now an Assistant Professor at Yale, appointed in Immunobiology and in Ophthalmology & Visual Sciences. His lab studies "anatomical immunity"—how the body's physical structure governs immune responses in the brain and eye—and he co-founded Rho Bio to translate that work into therapies for glaucoma and neurodegenerative disease. The engineer who once built drug delivery systems and the immunologist who mapped the body's hidden borders have converged on a single goal, getting real treatments to the patients he sees in clinic.