Yang obtained her bachelor's degree in medicine and a master’s degree in pediatrics in China. She conducted her first research on tracheal cartilage tissue engineering in Shanghai Children’s Medical Center, where she also received surgical training in congenital heart diseases. She then completed a second internship in Erasmus Medical Center, studying mouse embryonic and epiblast stem cells. In 2016, she began her PhD in Leiden University Medical Center and held her PhD defense "Modeling of the Cardiac Sympathetic Nervous System and The Contribution of Epicardium-derived Cells" in 2021. Afterwards, she returned to China to work as a pediatric surgeon in Shanghai.

In July 2024, Yang joined MERLN as a postdoctoral researcher under the supervision of Dr. Vanessa LaPointe. Corneal endothelial dysfunction causes the edema of cornea and blindness. Current therapies heavily rely on corneal transplantation, but a shortage of donor corneas limits treatment availability and outcomes. Yang’s work aims to develop and optimize protocols for generating functional corneal endothelial cells (hiCEnCs) from human-induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) for therapeutic applications.