Two years later, in 1970, she was inspired by her thesis advisor, Max Delbrück (winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize), and Jerome Vinograd to change her field of study to biology.
Lily Jan's proposal and her subsequent thesis work was focused on structural studies of rhodopsin localization in mammalian photoreceptors and also in plasma membranes.
Upon joining the Delbrück group, Jan was a member of the membrane biology subgroup where she performed challenging experiments in black lipid bilayers in the sub-terranean sub-basement of the electrical engineering building.
After that at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Jan and her husband would both begin postdoctoral fellowships in the group of Seymour Benzer at Caltech.
Their first collaborative effort was building an electrophysiology rig in the laboratory towards the purpose of characterizing the neuromuscular junction in Drosophila fly larvae.
During this time, the Jans would first observe that a male mutant ShakerKS133 larvae exhibited an exceptionally large excitatory response after motor stimulation.
[4] The early years of the Jans' research group at UCSF was distinguished by their efforts on cloning the Shaker channel and studies of neural development.
Their neural development research has been particularly distinguished by breakthroughs in neurogenesis and cell fate specification (cut, numb, atonal, and daughterless).
The function group of the laboratory is led by Lily and largely focuses on the studies of ion channels, their assembly, and their dynamic response to neural activity.