Yuh Nung Jan

Biography

Jan was born in Shanghai, China, to Ten Sun Jen and Li Ju Chen from Jiangxi. His birthday is officially listed as December 20, 1946, but that is according to the Chinese calendar and corresponds to January 11, 1947, of the Western calendar. In 1949, his family escaped to Xinpu, Hsinchu, Taiwan. Jan attended a prestigious public school and excelled in a nationwide college entrance exam, placing in the top 10 out of 30,000 students.

Jan would go on to attend National Taiwan University (NTU) for his undergraduate studies where he earned his B.S. in physics in 1968. Jan fulfilled his military service as a communication and electronics officer in the Taiwanese Air Force. Lily Jan was a fellow student studying physics at National Taiwan University and would become his future wife. At the time, both of the Jans were interested in pursuing advanced studies in theoretical high-energy physics and applied to graduate school abroad. They were both accepted to the physics program at Caltech. They were the only two students to be accepted from NTU, a major academic achievement given how few foreign students were accepted to the program at the time and especially so from their university.

In line with his research interests as an undergraduate, Jan began his graduate studies at Caltech with the intention to study theoretical physics. However, research seminars at Caltech and a conversation with Max Delbrück, a winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize, inspired Yuh Nung to switch fields to biology. Max Delbrück would become his Ph.D. advisor which was particularly formative given that Delbrück was also a physicist who later switched fields to biological physics. Jan's Ph.D. studies were focused on studying the perception of sensory signals by a single-celled fungus.

As he approached graduation, Yuh Nung would come across a publication by the scientist Seymour Benzer detailing opportunities associated with correlating fly embryo morphology with functional behavior. Inspired by opportunities associated with such lines of research, Yuh Nung decided to pursue post-doctoral studies in the field. In preparation for this shift in research, he and Lily Jan spent a summer at Cold Spring Harbor learning techniques in experimental neuroscience. This would mark the start of their life-long collaboration in the experimental laboratory and later in their roles as independent investigators. Upon joining the Benzer laboratory as post-docs later that year, they would build their first experimental set-up together, an electrophysiology rig. Their early collaborative research in the Benzer group was focused on uncovering the basis for defects in synaptic transmission. A series of mutant flies, named Shaker, with uncontrolled muscle contractions proved crucial to these endeavors and set the stage for some of their most significant contributions in the field of neuroscience.

The Jans would later move to Harvard Medical School for a second postdoc with Steven Kuffler. Jan and his wife then joined the faculty at UCSF in 1979 where they are co-PIs of the Jan Lab and have won numerous awards together. Jan has been an Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator since 1984.