Lily Jan, PhD （葉公杼院士）
Jack and DeLoris Lange Professor of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco
Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator
Academian of Academia Sinica, Taiwan
Lily majored in physics at National Taiwan University as an undergraduate and received her PhD in Biophysics and Physics at California Institute of Technology. Lily joined UCSF as an assistant professor in 1979 and stayed there since then. She is a member of National Academy of Sciences and a member of Academia Sinica. She is also an investigator of Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Her research focuses on potassium channels, calcium-activated chloride channels and mechanosensitive ion channels in neuron cells. As a collaborative effort with her husband, Yuh Nung Jan, she was the first to determine the DNA sequence of a potassium channel in 1987. They have identified several molecules that serve as these ion channels and also investigated how these ion channels work, how the channel activity is regulated and how these channels contribute to cellular functions such as neuronal signaling. Her group also investigates the functions and roles of ion channels in various pathological conditions, such as cancer, seizure and autism. Her research interests also include the mechanisms of dendrite development, the contribution of dendritic morphogenesis and channel modulation to the assembly and plasticity of functional neuronal circuits. She has published more than 300 papers. She also received numerous awards, such as K.S. Cole Award from Biophysical Society, Ralph W. Gerard Prize, Edward M. Scolnick Prize in Neuroscience, Wiley Prize in Biomedical Research, Gruber Prize in Neuroscience and Vilcek Prize honoring contributions of immigrants in 2017.