Yan, a Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Da-Ting Lin at the Neural Engineering Unit in the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), studies neuronal circuit dysfunction and mechanisms leading to compulsive reward seeking and taking. With the miniScope imaging system to record activity of hundreds of neurons in deep brain regions of freely moving animals, her research goal as a 2019 CCB Fellow is to explore new targets for the treatment of drug abuse without affecting natural reward.
Yan received her Ph.D. in neuropsychopharmacology from Peking University (China) in 2015. During her Ph.D. program, she investigated the neurobiological mechanisms and treatment underlying reward process.