Xiao-Fei Yang is Scientific Director of the USC Center for Affective Neuroscience, Development, Learning and Education (CANDLE) and is an Assistant Professor of Research at the Brain and Creativity Institute at USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and USC Rossier School of Education. Yang plays an important role in the overall planning, design and implementation of the lab’s ongoing projects, including protocol design, data collection and analysis, and manuscript preparation. She also provides guidance and mentorship to high school, undergraduate, and graduate research assistants who work in the lab.

Yang’s current work is an interdisciplinary project aimed at identifying teacher-level characteristics, practices, and mindsets to increase the development of thinking skills in students. Using an innovative design, that integrates behavioral and biometrics data collected during real-life classroom interactions and neurophysiological data collected in a controlled laboratory setting, the project attempts to characterize teachers’ implicit, potentially nonconscious patterns of processing that are hard to pinpoint with classroom observations and self-reports. Her research aims to understand the neurobiological bases of social emotional experience and their development in sociocultural contexts, with a focus on adolescence. She specializes in psychophysiological and neuroimaging techniques and has extensive experience relating qualitative analyses of natural behavior to neurophysiological dynamics.

Yang earned a bachelor’s degree in Biology from Fudan University in Shanghai, China, and a PhD in Neuroscience from USC.