She is the Paul Licht Distinguished Professor of Neurobiology at the University of California, Berkeley and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator.
She considers her father, a physicist, as a key influence in her decision to become a scientist, together with stories she heard as a child about Albert Einstein and Marie Curie.
Her doctoral advisor was Mu-ming Poo, with whom she conducted research on "cellular mechanisms of neurotransmitter secretion and synaptic plasticity.
"[6][2] She subsequently conducted postdoctoral research at the Rockefeller University and later Harvard Medical School, where she looked at information coding in the visual system.
[5][2] In 1997, Dan began teaching in the Molecular and Cell Biology Department of the University of California, Berkeley, and later became the Paul Licht Distinguished Professor.