Yang Dan (chemist)


Yang Dan is a Hong Kong-Chinese chemist and chemical biologist. She is the Chair Professor of Chemistry and the Morningside Professor in Chemical Biology at the University of Hong Kong. She was awarded the TWAS Prize for Chemistry in 2010 and the Young Woman Scientist Prize of China in 2011.

Education

Yang graduated with a BS degree from Fudan University in Shanghai, China, and earned her MA degree from Columbia University and her PhD in 1991 from Princeton University in the United States.

Career

Yang joined the Department of Chemistry at the University of Hong Kong in 1993, and is now the Chair Professor of Chemistry and the Morningside Professor in Chemical Biology.
Yang's research interests include aminoxy acids and foldamores, triptolide, and oxidation chemistry. She spent 17 years researching and synthesizing potential anti-cancer compounds from the plant Tripterygium wilfordii, for which she was awarded the Young Woman Scientist Prize of China in 2011, the first Hong Kong scientist to win the prize.
In 2010, she was awarded the TWAS Prize in Chemistry for "her significant contributions to the development of novel methods for the synthesis of bioactive natural products and probes for biomedical research."

Controversy

In December 2014, Dr. Roger Wong, a former assistant professor in HKU's chemistry department, accused Yang and her two PhD students of using falsified data in a research paper they published in the July 2014 issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society. After a year-long investigation, HKU concluded in February 2016 that the data were invalid, but cleared Yang of wrongdoing as she had no prior knowledge of the falsification. Yang denied that the data were falsified and said her lab had replicated the results and resubmitted the data to JACS. She stated that Wong only filed the complaint after she had fired him for poor performance.