Dr. Nieng Yan received her B.S. degree from the Department of Biological Sciences & Biotechnology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 2000. She then pursued her PhD in the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University under the supervision of Prof. Yigong Shi between 2000 and 2004. She was the regional winner of the Young Scientist Award (North America) co-sponsored by Science/AAAS and GE Healthcare in 2005 for her thesis on the structural and mechanistic study of programmed cell death. She continued her postdoctoral training at Princeton University, focusing on the structural characterization of intramembrane proteases. In 2007, she joined the faculty of School of Medicine, Tsinghua University. Her lab is mainly focusing on the structural and functional study of membrane transport proteins. In 2012 and 2013, she was promoted to tenured professor and Bayer Endowed Chair Professor, respectively. Dr. Yan is an HHMI international early career scientist, Cheung Kong Scholar, and the recipient of the 2015 Protein Society Young Investigator Award and the Raymond and Beverly Sackler International Prize in Biophysics.