TOP BLOGGER PROFILE

Followers: 449,811 by January 10, 2018

Unlike other scientists, Yan Ning, a 40-year-old Chinese biologist, fills her microblog with not only academic research but snippets of her life. One of her recent tweets, for example, was about a well-known costume-drama TV series. Yan said her microblog is a platform for her to take a break and have some fun. She registered with Sina Weibo when it started in 2010, and has sent more than 3,000 tweets. It is a big figure considering Yan's huge workload – since 2009, she has published 19 academic papers in Nature, Science and Cell. In recent years, Yan devoted herself to the research on the sodium channel, a structure on animals' cytomembrane to activate “electrical signals,” the basis for neural activities and muscular contraction. Yan said that if she gets stuck when writing a paper, she posts something on her microblog to refresh her brain. In May 2017, Yan was employed by Princeton University, where she received her doctorate and post-doctorate qualifications, as the Shirley M. Tilghman (a world-leading biologist and Princeton's first female president) tenured professor. Some people speculated that Yan was marginalized by Tsinghua University where she worked before, but Yan denied this, claiming that Tsinghua had given her such a free and comfortable environment that she wanted to challenge herself by leaving it.