Dr. Nieng Yan

Biography

Nieng Yan received his B.S. degree from the Department of Biological Sciences & Biotechnology at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 2000. He pursued his PhD in Molecular Biology at Princeton University under the supervision of Prof. Yigong Shi from 2000 to 2004. Yan was recognized as a regional winner of the Young Scientist Award (North America), co-sponsored by Science/AAAS and GE Healthcare in 2005. His doctoral thesis focused on the structural mechanistic study of programmed cell death. After completing his PhD, he continued his postdoctoral training at Princeton University, where he focused on the structural characterization of intramembrane proteases. In 2007, he joined the faculty of the School of Medicine at Tsinghua University, where his lab has focused primarily on the structural and functional study of membrane transport proteins, including glucose transporters and Na v /Ca v channels. Between 2012 and 2013, Yan was promoted to tenured professor and Bayer Endowed Chair Professor. He returned to Princeton University in 2017 as the founding Shirley M. Tilghman Professor of Molecular Biology. He was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) international early career scientist from 2012 to 2017 and received several prestigious awards, including the 2015 Protein Society Young Investigator Award and the Beverley & Raymond Sackler International Prize in Biophysics in 2015. He was elected a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences in 2019 and joined the School of Biotechnology and Biomolecular Sciences, Faculty of Science, as a Visiting Professorship under the UNSW SHARP Program in 2019.

Research Interests