Lily Yeh was born
Yeh Kung-chu (Ye Gongzhu) in
Fuzhou, China, to two accountants, Yeh Hong-shu and Lee Chuan-hwa. In 1949, her family moved to
Taiwan. She attended a prestigious public school, the
Taipei First Girls' High School. As a high-school student she was particularly drawn to the field of physics and was inspired by the 1957 Nobel Prize in physics awarded to
Tsung Dao Lee and
Chen Ning Yang as well as the experimental physicist
Chien Shiung Wu. Jan attended
National Taiwan University where she earned her B.S. in physics in 1968. Her co-mentors for her graduate studies were
Jean Paul Revel and
Max Delbrück. Upon joining the Delbrück group, Jan was a member of the membrane biology subgroup where she performed challenging experiments in black lipid bilayers in the sub-terranean sub-basement of the electrical engineering building. The Jans have shared that from this point forward Delbrück ensured separation of her graduate work from those of her spouse
Yuh Nung Jan given his graduate studies with
Delbrück were focused on the sensory responses of the fungus
Phycomyces to light, among other stimuli. Lily Jan would go on to hold postdoctoral positions in the laboratory of
Seymour Benzer at Caltech and subsequently in the laboratory of
Stephen Kuffler at
Harvard Medical School. Jan and her husband joined the faculty at
University of California, San Francisco in 1979 where they are leaders of a joint research group. She has been a
HHMI investigator since 1984. == Research ==