Asian-American Neuroscientist of the Week (5/4)

Dan Yang (丹扬) is a Chinese-American researcher. Her father, a physicist, inspired her to go into science by telling her stories of Marie Curie and Albert Einstein.

Using the mouse as her model organism, combined with optogenetics, imaging, virus-mediated circuit tracing, and electrophysiology, she researches neural circuits that control sleep in the mammalian brain, as well as how the "frontal cortex exerts top-down executive control."

She has received the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, Beckman Young Investigator Award, and Society for Neuroscience Research Awards for Innovation in Neuroscience for her work. She was also elected to the US National Academy of Sciences in 2018.

She is currently a professor of Neurobiology at the University of California, Berkeley and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator.