Yang Dan
Yang Dan is professor of molecular and cell biology and of neuroscience and Pivotal Life Sciences Chancellor’s Chair in Neuroscience at UC Berkeley. Dan’s lab uses a variety of techniques — including optogenetics, electrophysiology, imaging and virus-mediated circuit tracing — to identify which circuits in the mammalian brain control sleep and how the frontal cortex of the brain exerts top-down executive control. Dan is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.
Dan was born in Beijing and studied physics as an undergraduate student at Peking University. She received her Ph.D. training in Biological Sciences at Columbia University, where she worked on cellular mechanisms of neurotransmitter secretion and synaptic plasticity. She did her postdoctoral research on information coding in the visual system at Rockefeller University and Harvard Medical School.