He served as chief of the National Laboratory of Biomacromolecules, Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Yang was a native of Ningbo, Zhejiang, and was born in Shanghai in 1927.

Just after his graduation, he worked for the Institute of Experimental Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) as an assistant.

In 1956, Yang went to USSR and studied at the Department of Biology, Moscow State University until 1960 when he received a PhD there.

Yang was a long-serving senior scientist at the Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences.