Yi Rao is the President of Capital Medical University, a Chair Professor and the Founding Director of the PKU-IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research at Peking University, the Founding Director of PKU-Tsinghua Center for Life Sciences, and the Founding Director of the Chinese Institute for Brain Research at Beijing.

    Rao received medical and graduate training in China from 1978 to 1985. He obtained his PhD from the University of California at San Francisco in 1991 with a thesis on molecular and genetic analysis of cellular communication in Drosophila neural development. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard working on molecular mechanisms of neural development in amphibians. He was on the faculty of Washington University School of Medicine from 1994 to 2004 and Northwestern University School of Medicine from 2004 to 2007, where his lab worked on molecular and cellular basis of neural development, revealing the origin of two eyes in a single morphogenetic field, discovering the chemorepellent function of the Slit proteins in axon guidance and neuronal migration, and dissecting signal transduction mechanisms of the chemorepellent Slit and and chemoattractant Netrin. His lab has found conserved guidance mechanisms between neurons and leukocytes.

    In 2007, he returned to China as the Dean of the School of Life Sciences at Peking University. His lab currently investigates molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying behavior and cognition. Rao has proposed the concept of chemoconnectome (CCT) as the entire set of neurotransmitters, neuromodulators, neuropeptides and their receptors underlying chemical transmission in an animal. The Rao lab has invented the generally applicable chemoconnectomics approach and generated new genetic resources to study the functional roles of genes and cells in the CCT, to manipulate chemical transmission and to map neural circuits. In humans, they use genetics, genomics and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate genes and brain regions important in cognition. The Rao lab has carried out research with flies, frogs, mice, rats, monkeys and humans to understand fundamental mechanisms both those conserved among animals and those unique for humans.