Qingyun Dan received his B.S. degree in Biology from the School of Life Sciences, Peking University. He then joined the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, where he obtained his Ph.D. in Biochemistry under the mentorship of Professor Janet L. Smith. His doctoral research focused on fungal indole alkaloid drug biosynthesis, during which he reconstituted entire biosynthetic pipelines in vitro and identified a key Diels-Alder cyclase responsible for stereochemical control. After that, he conducted postdoctoral research at the University of California Berkeley with Professor Jay D. Keasling, where he developed polyketide synthase (PKS)-based biosynthetic platforms. His postdoc work expanded the chemical design space of PKS systems, enabling high-titer microbial production of industrial diols and amino alcohols. He also led efforts to employ iterative PKS pathways to design and synthesize polycyclopropanated fatty acids with optimized energy properties for aviation biofuels. Dan has a long-standing interest in natural products discovery, complex enzyme (megasynthase) engineering, and new-to-nature biocatalyst design, and he now focuses on integrating these themes into metabolic engineering and biomanufacturing.
Dan has received many awards, including the Taconic Scholarship, Founder Scholarship and Mong Man Wai Fund at Peking University, Pfizer Global Research & Development Fund and the Anthony and Lillian Lu Award at the University of Michigan. He is a Bakar Innovation Fellow at the University of California Berkeley. Dan has been invited to present his research at national and international conferences, including the 2024 ASM Microbe meeting and the 2025 SIMB annual meeting.