Dr. Helen Yang is currently a postdoctoral fellow in Rachel Wilson’s lab in the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Yang received her BA in Molecular and Cellular Biology from Harvard University, where she worked in Dr. Michael Greenberg’s lab studying the function of MECP2, the gene mutated in the neurodevelopment disorder Rett syndrome. She then went on to do her graduate studies in Dr. Thomas Clandinin’s lab at Stanford University. Using the Drosophila early visual system, she examined how information is transformed within neurons and across synapses. To carry out these studies, she collaborated with Dr. Michael Lin’s lab to pioneer in vivo, subcellular-resolution, two-photon imaging of genetically encoded voltage indicators; she also co-developed FlpStop, a novel tool for cell type-specific gene disruption and rescue. As a postdoc in the Wilson lab, she has extended her studies of neural circuits in Drosophila to the motor system by asking how descending neurons, which connect the brain to the nerve cord, control walking. By using high-resolution behavioral analysis, electrophysiology, functional imaging, optogenetics, and connectomics, she examines what motor information is conveyed by descending neurons and how that information is represented across the descending neuron population.