Yang Dan studied physics as an undergraduate student at Peking University, China. She received her Ph.D. training in Biological Sciences at Columbia University, where she conducted research on the cellular mechanisms of synaptic transmission and plasticity.  She did her postdoctoral research on information coding in the visual system at Rockefeller University and Harvard Medical School. She is currently a Paul Licht Distinguished Professor in Biology and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of California, Berkeley.  Dan’s lab has provided important insights into the microcircuits underlying visual cortical computation and cellular mechanisms for functional plasticity. In particular, they revealed the functional consequences of spike-timing-dependent plasticity at multiple levels, from synapse to circuits to perception. Current research in her lab focuses on identifying neural circuits that control sleep and understanding mechanisms by which the frontal cortex exerts top-down executive control. Dan has received Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, Beckman Young Investigator Award, and Society for Neuroscience Research Awards for Innovation in Neuroscience. 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.