Professor Yang teaches environmental law and related courses at the Law School. Prior to joining to the Santa Clara faculty, he taught law at Vermont Law School, the University of Pittsburgh, Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, and as a Fulbright Lecturer at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. His experience outside of the academy has been wide-ranging, including as Deputy General Counsel of the US Environmental Protection Agency in the Obama Administration, as Director of a USAID and State Department-funded initiative to build China’s institutional capacity in environmental law and governance, and as an attorney in the Environment Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. The intersection of social justice and civil rights issues with environmental law has been a major focus of Professor Yang’s academic research and writing, law practice, and public service. From 1998 to 2003, he was a member of EPA’s National Environmental Justice Advisory Council. He will be teaching a seminar on environmental justice at the law school in the spring of 2017. Professor Yang graduated magna cum laude with a B.A. in biochemistry from Harvard University and received his J.D. degree from the University of California at Berkeley.