Mu Yang

Director of the Mouse NeuroBehavior Core
Columbia University Medical Center

Mu Yang is a behavioral neuroscientist and the director of the Mouse NeuroBehavior Core at Columbia University Medical Center. She received training in animal behavior and neuroethology in the lab of the late Robert Blanchard at the University of Hawaii, where she earned her Ph.D. In 2006, she joined the lab of Jacqueline Crawley at the National Institute of Mental Health for postdoctoral training. She spent 2012 to 2016 as an assistant professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and a faculty member at the MIND Institute at the University California, Davis. In 2016, she joined Columbia’s Institute for Genomic Medicine to lead the university’s first centralized state-of-the-art mouse behavior phenotyping facility. Since summer 2017, her team has provided testing and data analysis services to over 30 Columbia research groups.

Explore more from The Transmitter

Illustration of an open journal featuring lines of text and small illustrations of eyes and mouths.

Processing facial emotions, and more

Here is a roundup of autism-related news and research spotted around the web for the week of 4 May.

By Jill Adams
5 May 2026 | 2 min read
Research image of patters of expression of autosomal genes

Gene activity in human cortex shows striking sex differences

The results mark a “dramatic shift” in how neuroscientists think about sex differences, and they may help explain sex biases in certain neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental conditions.

By Lauren Schenkman
5 May 2026 | 5 min read
typing on computer

Why expertise won’t protect you from AI’s influence

When writing a grant or reasoning about a problem, artificial intelligence can exert a subtle bias that often goes undetected, even if we’re doing our best to be aware of it.

By Tim Requarth
4 May 2026 | 6 min read