Dr. William Yang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA. He also serves as a regular member of the NIH-CSR Cell Death in Neurodegeneration Study Section, a scientific advisory board member of the Hereditary Disease Foundation, a faculty member for Faculty 1000 Medicine's neurogenetics section, and an editorial board member for Molecular Neurogeneration.

Dr. Yang obtained a combined M.S. and B.S. (summa cum laude) in molecular biophysics and biochemistry from Yale University in 1991. He received his Ph.D. in molecular neuroscience from Rockefeller University in 1998 and M.D. from Weill Medical College of Cornell University in 2000. Afterwards, he completed his medical internship at the New York-Presbyterian Hospital in 2001; one year of postdoctoral training with Nat Heintz at Rockefeller University; and joined the UCLA faculty in 2002. Dr. Yang's laboratory is applying advanced mouse molecular genetic approaches, along with cell biological and biochemical approaches, to research the following questions:

1. What are the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying the late-onset neurodegeneration in Huntington's disease (HD) and Parkinson's disease (PD)?
2. How does the mammalian basal ganglia (BG) neural circuit normally function, and how would dysfunction of this circuit lead to clinical manifestations of movement disorders (including HD and PD) and psychiatric disorders?

A unitary theme of his research is to uncover the fundamental mechanisms underlying the function, dysfunction, and degeneration of the mammalian basal ganglia.

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