Q & A

Yuh-Nung Jan is at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). He studied Physics as an undergraduate at National Taiwan University. In 1968, he entered Caltech as a graduate student in theoretical high-energy physics. Two years later, he switched to biology. After he completed his Ph.D. with Max Delbrück in 1974, he joined Seymour Benzer’s lab as a postdoctoral fellow. There he began working on Drosophila neurobiology, together with his long-term collaborator (and wife) Lily Jan. Following a short second postdoc with Steve Kuffler at Harvard Medical School, they started their own little lab at UCSF in 1979 and have happily settled there ever since. He has worked on many areas of neurobiology, including peptide neurotransmitters, potassium channels, neuronal cell fate specification, asymmetric cell division and most recently, dendrite development.