On February 11th, Elsa Yan will present “Chemistry of Food and Cooking.” Trouble with a flat soufflé? Did your hollandaise sauce separate? Join us for an entertaining lecture by Prof. Elsa Yan on how chemistry is the key to winning on Cake Wars.
Time: Demonstrations by Synapse of Yale Scientific Magazine from 10am - 11am; Talk from 11am - noon.
About Elsa Yan: Elsa Yan was born and grew up in Hong Kong. She graduated from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1995. Working with Kenneth Eisenthal on nonlinear optics and surface sciences, she obtained her Ph.D. at Columbia University in 2000. From 2000-2004, she was a postdoctoral fellow in Richard Mathies’s lab at UC Berkeley and a visiting fellow in Thomas Sakmar’s lab at the Rockefeller University. She combined Raman spectroscopy with techniques in molecular biology to understand the molecular mechanism of signal transduction in the G-protein coupled receptor rhodopsin. In 2004, she joined The Rockefeller University, where she continued to develop methods in expression and purification of membrane proteins. In 2007, Elsa became an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Yale. She was promoted to Associate Professor of Chemistry in 2012.
At the Yan Lab, Yan and her team are interested in understanding biological phenomena related to biomembranes at the molecular level. They focus on protein folding at membrane surfaces and signal transduction across biomembranes through G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs). Using techniques in molecular biology and chemical biology, they express and purify recombinant soluble and membrane proteins. The team then applies second-order laser spectroscopy and biophysical methods to obtain thermodynamic and kinetic information to investigate structure and functions of the proteins.