Yang, from China, is a doctoral student in the Translational Social Neuroscience Group at the Center for Mental Health. Before that he received a bachelor degree of Arts in Beijing University of Posts and Communications, followed by a three-year master program of basic psychology in Capital Normal University.

He has a curious mind for various topics in cognitive neuroscience, with special focuses on decision-making and social cognition. One line of his current research is to investigate the association between social cognition and delay discounting through large open MRI datasets. At the same time, he is also investigating the formation and generalization of empathy, through  experiments and computational modeling.