Hongyan earned the MBBS degree and finished the medical training in China. Then she got her master of research degree on Biomedical Research (Anaesthetics, Pain Medicine and Intensive Care) at Imperial College London (UK). She is currently working as a doctoral researcher at Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences. She is interested in how the brain and spinal cord interact to establish the multi-faceted experience of pain and combining basic and clinical research to explore pain modulation in greater depth.