Yang Dan, PhD, is Nan Fung Life Sciences Chancellor’s Chair Professor in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology and an HHMI investigator at the University of California, Berkeley. She studied physics as an undergraduate student at Peking University and received her PhD training at Columbia University. She did her postdoctoral research on information coding in the visual system at Rockefeller University and Harvard Medical School. Her recent interest is to understand neural control and function of sleep. Using state-of-the-art techniques to target genetically defined cell types for recording and manipulation, Dr. Dan’s team has identified key circuits for the generation of both REM and non-REM sleep. Recently they have also begun investigating the function and homeostasis of sleep.