Wei Yang (; born 1963) is a Chinese-American structural biologist. She is a distinguished investigator at the National Institutes of Health and was elected a member of the US National Academy of Sciences in 2013.
Yang was born in Shanghai, China in 1963.[1] She entered Fudan University in 1980, before transferring to Stony Brook University in the United States in 1983, where she earned her B.A. degree.[2] [3] She earned her M.A. (1985) and Ph.D. (1991) in Biochemistry & Molecular Biophysics from Columbia University.
Since 1995 she has been a senior scientist in the Laboratory of Molecular Biology at the National Institutes of Health. Her research mainly focuses on DNA mismatch repair, translesion synthesis, and V(D)J recombination.[4] Her lab discovered that DNA synthesis and RNA degradation reactions are propelled by cation trafficking and require transiently bound Mg²⁺ and K⁺ ions that are absent in the static structures of substrate- or product-enzyme complexes.
In 2011, the Protein Society honored Yang with the Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin Award. She was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2013 and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015. She has naturalized as a US citizen.