In 2012, Ya Gao joined BGI Health Technology Co., Ltd. to engage in the clinical application and technology development of non-invasive prenatal genetic testing (NIPT) technology. He focused on the application of sequencing technology in the fields of maternal-fetal medicine and rare disease diagnosis and the development of clinical innovative molecular detection technology. Since 2015, he has been working in the BGI-Research, mainly engaged in translational genome medicine research and the multi-omics studies of birth cohorts. Ya Gao is now the lab head of the Shenzhen Engineering Laboratory for Birth Defects Screening. He also served as a member of the Bioactive Substance Content Detection Working Group (SAC/TC 387/WG3) of the National Professional Standardization Technical Committee and a member of the Health Inspection Committee of the Shenzhen Association for Analysis and Testing. He has published more than 30 papers in international journals such as BJOG, Ultrasound Obstet Gynecol, and Clin Transl Med, etc. and has given oral presentations on the European Human Genetics Annual Meeting (ESHG), the International Society for Prenatal Diagnosis (ISPD), and the Chinese Fetal Association.