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 a laptop computer superimposed over a scroll.

‘Friction-maxxing’ in school: Students should read primary literature, not AI summaries

Trainees need to learn how to identify a neuroscience paper’s major takeaways and integrate them into their understanding. This skill doesn’t come from outsourcing the work to large language models.

By Nora Bradford
26 March 2026 | 5 min read

Head direction cells stably orient mice to outside world

The cells’ representations show little drift over time—unlike those of other navigation system neurons—and may provide a “rigid backbone” for more flexible sensory and cognitive responses.

By Angie Voyles Askham
25 March 2026 | 0 min watch

Juan Gallego discusses how manifolds are transforming our understanding of the coordination of neuronal population activity

A wealth of evidence supports the view that neural manifolds are real and useful, Gallego says, even if they may not completely solve the age-old mind-body problem.

By Paul Middlebrooks
25 March 2026 | 121 min listen