After graduating from Nanchong Senior High School, Pan attended Peking University and received a bachelor's degree in biochemistry in 1988.
Through the China-United States Biochemistry Examination and Application (CUSBEA) program, Pan moved to the U.S. in 1989 and pursued Ph.D. studies in transcriptional regulation in the laboratory of Albert Courey at University of California, Los Angeles.
He was recruited to the department of molecular biology and genetics at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 2004, where he became an Howard Hughes Medical Investigator (2008), a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2012), and received the Paul Marks Prize for Cancer Research (2013).
As a postdoctoral fellow, Pan identified cAMP-dependent protein kinase (PKA) as a mediator of Hedgehog signaling[11] and Kuzbanian (ADAM10) as a transmembrane metalloprotease responsible for the proteolytic cleavage and activation of the cell-surface receptor Notch.
[12] Early studies from his laboratory at UT Southwestern uncovered the molecular function of Tsc1 and Tsc2 by linking these tumor suppressor genes to Rheb[13] and mTOR signaling.