Dr. Yang is SUNY Distinguished Professor, Simons Chair and Professor of Medicine with joint appointments in the Departments of Biomedical Informatics and Physiology & Biophysics at the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University.  An internationally renowned physician scientist in the field of gastroenterology, Dr. Yang’s research focus has been on identifying the causes and treatments of digestive diseases including inflammatory bowel disease and gastrointestinal cancer.  He received his Ph.D. degree from Princeton University, and M.D. from Rutgers University Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. Dr. Yang received clinical training in Internal Medicine Residency followed by Gastroenterology Fellowship at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and was a faculty member in the Department of Medicine at Johns Hopkins from 1989 to 2001. He was appointed R. Bruce Logue Professor of Medicine and Director of the Division of Digestive Diseases in 2001 at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia, where he also held the positions of Professor of Department of Hematology and Medical Oncology and Director of the Emory Epithelial Pathobiology Research Development Center, which was supported by a Digestive Diseases Center Grant from the National Institutes of Health. In 2011, Dr. Yang was recruited to Stony Brook University to his current positon. As the chief administrative officer of the largest department at Stony Brook, Dr. Yang is responsible for establishing and managing the clinical, research and education missions of the department. In addition to the administrative appointment as Chair, Dr. Yang is President of Stony Brook Internists, a University Faculty Practice Corporation (UFPC) that oversees the clinical activity of Medicine faculty practice, and Chief of Service/Medicine at Stony Brook University Hospital, in which he represents the Medicine faculty in activities related to the hospital.

Dr. Yang's lab was the first to identify a number of Krüppel-like transcription factors (KLFs) and characterize their roles in the biology and pathobiology of the gut epithelium including stem cells and cancer. He has been Principal Investigator for numerous NIH-funded grants and authored or coauthored over 200 original scientific articles, reviews or chapters. He is a member of several honor societies including Alpha Omega Alpha (AOA) Honor Medical Society, American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI), Association of American Physicians (AAP), Fellow of the American College of Physicians (FACP), American Gastroenterological Association Fellow (AGAF), and Fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science (FAAAS), and was the recipient of the Distinguished Alumnus Award from his alma mater, Rutgers University Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. He was an invited speaker at over 30 national and international conferences and by numerous prestigious institutions residing in the United States, Europe, Japan, China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. He served as an editor or was on the editorial boards of many professional journals, including Gastroenterology, the leading journal in the field, as well as reviewers or chairs of numerous review panels or study sections at the National Institutes of Health and Veterans Administration, and more recently, the National Health Research Institute in Taiwan.