Yang Dan (neuroscientist)

Yang Dan (Chinese: 丹扬; pinyin: Dān Yáng) is a Chinese-American neuroscientist. She is the Paul Licht Distinguished Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator. Recognized for her research on the neural circuits that control behavior, she was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences in 2018.

This article is about the Chinese-American neuroscientist. For the Hong Kong chemist, see Yang Dan (chemist).
The native form of this personal name is Dan Yang. This article uses Western name order when mentioning individuals.
Yang Dan
Born
Beijing, China
NationalityChinese
Alma materPeking University
Columbia University
Known forOptogenetics
AwardsAlfred P Sloan Research Fellowship,
Beckman Young Investigator Award
Scientific career
FieldsNeuroscience
InstitutionsUniversity of California, Berkeley

Early life and education

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.[1]

Dan graduated from Peking University with a bachelor's degree in physics.[2] 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.[3] She subsequently conducted postdoctoral research at the Rockefeller University and later Harvard Medical School.[2]

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.[2]

Her research projects include neural circuits controlling sleep and the function of the prefrontal cortex.[4] In a 2015 research paper published in Nature, Dan and her team found that activation of GABAergic neurons in the medulla oblongata brain region of sleeping mice causes them to enter REM sleep or the dream state, whereas the same activation in mice when they are awake causes them to eat more.[5][6]

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.[2]

Personal life

Dan's husband is Mu-ming Poo, her former academic advisor and also a member of the National Academy of Sciences.[7]

References
  1. "Yang Dan". Neuron. 91 (6): 1195–1196. 2016-09-21. doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2016.08.039. ISSN 0896-6273.
  2. "Yang Dan". National Academy of Sciences. Retrieved 2018-10-16.
  3. "Yang Dan, PhD Columbia 1994, elected to the National Academy of Sciences". Columbia University. 2018-05-14. Retrieved 2018-10-15.
  4. "Yang Dan". Department of Molecular & Cell Biology, UC Berkeley. Retrieved 2018-10-16.
  5. "Sweet dreams are made of cheese". Scientifica. Retrieved 2018-10-18.
  6. Weber, Franz; Chung, Shinjae; Beier, Kevin T.; Xu, Min; Luo, Liqun; Dan, Yang (October 2015). "Control of REM sleep by ventral medulla GABAergic neurons". Nature. 526 (7573): 435–438. doi:10.1038/nature14979. ISSN 0028-0836. PMC 4852286. PMID 26444238.
  7. Xu Shengjin 徐圣进. "无私奉献 甘为幕后". Institute of Neuroscience, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Retrieved 2018-10-16.
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