[13] Yang was born in 1958 in Taiwan,[citation needed] growing up in the countryside before moving to Taipei with his family at the age of 10.
[14] Initially Yang worked on studying the nonlinear optical photorefractive effect in barium titanate crystals[16][17] in the Department of Physics, earning his M.S.
[2][14][20] Yang's Ph.D. thesis was entitled Photoinduced charge carrier generation and transport in polydiacetylene single crystals.
[20] After graduating with his Ph.D. in 1992, Yang worked as a researcher at UNIAX Corporation in Santa Barbara, California (now DuPont Display Materials).
[14][15] Yang began his independent academic career in 1997 as an Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles.