Yang Dan has made fundamental contributions to understanding the cellular and circuit mechanisms underlying perception, cognition, and behavior. Her work on sleep has overturned the textbook model of a single “sleep center” by discovering multiple sleep-promoting neuron populations across the mammalian brain. She proposed the “Motor Theory” of sleep control and the “Catecholamine Hypothesis” of sleep function, offering new frameworks for understanding sleep’s restorative effects and its disruption in diseases such as Parkinson’s.
Dan’s research has broken new ground in top-down attention and conscious perception, identifying cortical circuits that modulate visual attention and revealing how sleep suppresses consciousness via specific inhibitory microcircuits. Her honors include the Edward M. Scolnick Prize in Neuroscience (2023), the Peter Seeburg Integrative Neuroscience Prize (2024), and election to the US National Academy of Sciences (2018) and American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2025). She is the founding Director of the Institute of Neuromodulation and Cognition, Shenzhen Medical Academy of Research and Translation in China.
Professional position
- Director and Senior Investigator, Institute of Neuromodulation and Cognition, Shenzhen Medical Academy of Research and Translation (SMART)
