Yang Dan

Yang Dan Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the University of California, Berkeley Yang Dan is a Paul Licht Distinguished Professor in Biology and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. She grew up in Beijing and studied physics as an undergraduate student at Peking University. She conducted her PhD research in the lab of Mu-ming Poo at Columbia University, where she studied the cellular mechanisms of synaptic transmission and plasticity. For postdoctoral training, she studied visual processing with Clay Reid, Joseph Atick, and Torsten Wiesel at Rockefeller University and Harvard Medical School. Her lab at UC Berkeley uses a variety of techniques, including electrophysiology, imaging, and optogenetics, to study neuromodulation of global brain states and the microcircuits underlying cortical computation. Currently, a major interest of her group is to identify the key neural circuits generating both rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep and non-REM sleep. To understand cognitive control of goal-directed behavior, her lab is also investigating how the prefrontal cortex generates taskrelated activity and how such activity modulates the downstream targets for optimal behavioral control.