Lily Jan

Lily Jan (born Jan 20, 1947) is the Jack and DeLoris Lange Professor of Molecular Physiology at UC San Francisco.

Jan was born in Fu-Chow, China to two accountants. In 1949, her family escaped to Taiwan

She went to National Taiwan University where she earned a BS in physics in 1968. She started her graduate studies at Caltech studying theoretical physics, but she changed her field to biology. Her thesis advisor, Max Delbrück, a winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize, was also physicist who later studied biology. After graduating in 1974, she did a postdoc at Caltech under Seymour Benzer before moving to Harvard Medical School for a postdoc with Steven Kuffler. She has been an HHMI investigator since 1984.

She and her husband both studied physics at National Taiwan University before going to Caltech where her husband was also a physics grad student before switching to biology. They were married in 1971. They were in the same lab at Caltech for graduate studies, did two postdocs together, and have won several awards together. She and her husband joined the faculty at UCSF in 1979 where they set up a joint lab. She and her husband have a son, Max, and a daughter, Emily.

Awards

• Elected member, National Academy of Sciences (1996)
• Elected member, Academia Sinica, Taiwan (1998)
• Distinguished Alumni Award, California Institute of Technology (2006)
• National Institute of Health MERIT Award (2006)
• Elected member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2007)
• W. Alden Spencer Award and Lectureship, Columbia University (1988)
• K. S. Cole Award, Biophysical Society (2004)
• Jan Lab Symposium (2006)
• Society of Chinese Bioscientists in America Presidential Award (2006)
• Ralph Gerard Prize, Society for Neuroscience (2009)
• Edward M. Scolnick Prize in Neuroscience, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2010)
• Albert and Ellen Grass Lecture, Society for Neuroscience (2010)
• Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences (2011)
• Gruber Prize in Neuroscience (2012)