Yang Dan (neuroscientist)

Dan was born and raised in Beijing, China. She considers her father, a physicist, as a key influence in her decision to become a scientist, together with stories she heard as a child about Albert Einstein and Marie Curie. Dan graduated from Peking University with a bachelor's degree in physics. She moved to the United States to pursue graduate studies at Columbia University, where she earned her Ph.D. in biology in 1994. Her doctoral advisor was Mu-ming Poo, with whom she conducted research on "cellular mechanisms of neurotransmitter secretion and synaptic plasticity." She subsequently conducted postdoctoral research at the Rockefeller University and later Harvard Medical School, where she looked at information coding in the visual system. == Career ==

In 1997, Dan began teaching in the Molecular and Cell Biology Department of the University of California, Berkeley, and later became the Paul Licht Distinguished Professor. She is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator. Dan's lab employs techniques such as optogenetics, electrophysiology, imaging, and virus-mediated circuit tracing to understand how neural circuits regulate sleep and executive control by the frontal cortex. Dan was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in 2018, in recognition of her "contributions to understanding the microcircuits underlying cortical computation, cellular mechanisms for functional plasticity, and neural circuits controlling sleep", and more generally, her research on the neural circuits that control behavior. == Personal life ==

Dan's husband is Mu-ming Poo, her former academic advisor and also a member of the National Academy of Sciences. == References ==