Yan Ning,

a professor of biology at Tsinghua University, stirred up quite a fuss online when she announced she had accepted an offer to become a tenured professor at Princeton University in the United States. Some suspected her of leaving due to failing to secure funding from the National Natural Science Foundation of China. Yan dismissed such rumors on her microblog, saying that she took the decision because she was afraid of making no progress by remaining in the same institution for too long.

Born in 1977 in Laiwu, east China’s Shandong Province, Yan received her bachelor’s degree from the School of Life Sciences of Tsinghua University in 2000 and her doctor’s degree from the Department of Molecular Biology of Princeton University in 2004. She completed her postdoctoral studies at Princeton from 2004 until she returned to teach at Tsinghua in 2007.