Yan earned a bachelor's degree from
Peking University in 1993. She was a student of
Gian-Carlo Rota at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she earned her Ph.D. in 1997 with a dissertation on
The Theory of Commuting Boolean Algebras. After working for two years as a Courant Instructor at
New York University, she joined Texas A&M in 1999, with a three-year hiatus as Chern Professor at the Center of Combinatorics,
Nankai University, from 2005 to 2008. ==Book==