Nieng Yan


Nieng Yan or Yan Ning is a structural biologist and the Shirley M. Tilghman Professor of Molecular Biology at Princeton University. Her laboratory currently studies the structural and chemical basis for membrane transport and lipid metabolism.

Career

Yan was born 1977 in Zhangqiu, Jinan, Shandong. She received her B.S. degree from the Department of Biological Sciences & Biotechnology, Tsinghua University, in 2000. She then studied molecular biology at Princeton University, under the supervision of Shi Yigong, and received her Ph.D. degree in 2004. Her doctoral dissertation was titled "Biochemical and structural dissection of the regulation of apoptotic pathways in Drosophila and C. elegans." She was the regional winner of the Young Scientist Award in North America, which is co-sponsored by Science/AAAS and GE Healthcare, for her thesis on the structural and mechanistic study of programmed cell death. She continued her postdoctoral training at Princeton, focusing on the structural characterization of intramembrane proteases, until 2007.
In 2007, she returned to Tsinghua University with an invitation by Zhao Nanming, director of the Department of Biology at the time. At the age of 30, she became the youngest professor and Ph.D. advisor in Tsinghua. Her research focused on the structure and mechanism of membrane transport proteins, exemplified by the glucose transporter GLUT1 and voltage-gated sodium and calcium channels.
In 2017, Yan decided to leave Tsinghua and join Princeton University. The move gained widespread attention in China and led to a national discussion both within the science community and the general public. The cause was widely speculated to be the difficulty to do what she wanted to do under China's academic system, as she had criticized the China National Natural Science Foundation's reluctance to support high risk research in a series of blogs. However, Yan dismissed this claim later, and stated "changing one's environment can bring new pressure and inspiration for academic breakthroughs".
For her research achievements, Dr. Yan has won a number of prizes. She was an HHMI international early career scientist in 2012–2017, the recipient of the 2015 Protein Society Young Investigator Award, the 2015 Beverley & Raymond Sackler International Prize in Biophysics, the Alexander M. Cruickshank Award at the GRC on membrane transport proteins in 2016, the 2018 FAOBMB Award for Research Excellence, and the 2019 Weizmann Women & Science Award. Yan was elected a foreign associate of the US National Academy of Sciences in April 2019.

Honors and awards

2019