Dan earned her PhD from the Department for Earth System Science at Tsinghua University in January 2018, where she worked with Profs. Qiang Zhang and Kebin He, and joined the Davis group Dan at UCI soon afgter. At UCI, she has worked on global "committed" CO2 emissions from energy infrastructure and renewable energy resources on the power system. She specializes in anthropogenic air pollutants and CO₂ emissions accounting, and air pollution and climate change mitigation policies for global power sector. Dan has published over 20 articles, including in Nature, Nature Geoscience, and Nature Sustaiability as first/co-first author.

If operated as historically, existing fossil energy infrastructure will emit >650 Gt of CO₂, well over the most recent 1.5°C carbon budgets and 2/3 of the remaining 2°C budget. There is thus little or no room for new fossil infrastructure under the targets; rather existing infrastructure must be retired early.

We assess fuel- and region-specific opportunities for reducing undesirable air pollutant emissions using a newly developed emission dataset at the level of individual generating units. Retiring or installing emission control technologies on units representing 0.8% of the global coal-fired power plant capacity could reduce levels of PM2.5 emissions by 8–14%.

In a groundbreaking interdisciplinary analysis, we quantify the global links among consumption of goods and services, production of air pollution, atmospheric transport of that pollution, and human mortality due to the pollution. We find that roughly a quarter of air pollution deaths are related to goods produced in one world region for consumption in another.

In recent years, international trade has displaced radiative forcing related to aerosols such as black carbon, sulfate, nitrate and ammonium from developed, net-importing nations like the U.S. to emerging, net-exporting nations like China. We quantify this shift and discuss its policy implications.