Profile of King-Wai Yau

Abstract

Neuroscientist King-Wai Yau of Johns Hopkins University has made fundamental discoveries concerning the mechanisms underlying sensory transduction. His research over the past four decades has focused primarily on vision. “Vision is one of our most precious senses from which come art, science, humanity, beauty, and practically all aspects of life,” says Yau. His findings concerning phototransduction—the process by which light is converted into a neural signal—have led to a sophisticated understanding of many hereditary diseases causing blindness. Additionally, Yau has elucidated the process of olfaction transduction that, like vision, relies on a G protein-coupled cellular signaling pathway. His Inaugural Article, signifying his 2010 election to the National Academy of Sciences, advances understanding of the electrical response of olfactory neurons to odorants. King-Wai Yau. Image courtesy of Johns Hopkins Medicine (Baltimore, MD). Yau was born in China in 1948, the sixth of seven children. His family relocated to Hong Kong within months of his birth. His father died 5 years later. Dedicating himself to scholarship and science, Yau excelled in high school. He entered the University of Hong Kong Faculty of Medicine in 1967. After a year, he set out for the United States, studying at the University of Minnesota before transferring to Princeton University on a full scholarship to study physics and eventually graduating in 1971. “The best decision that I ever made was to leave medical school,” Yau says. “I determined that I did not wish to be a clinician.” Yau then entered Harvard Medical School, where he earned a PhD in neurobiology in 1975. At Harvard, he studied invertebrate neurobiology under John Nicholls in the university’s small but influential neurobiology department. There, he became …