Na Ji studied chemistry and physics as an undergraduate in the University of Science and Technology of China and later a graduate student at University of California Berkeley. In 2006, she moved to Janelia Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute and worked on improving the speed and resolution of in vivo brain imaging. She started her own group in Janelia in 2011, where, in addition to imaging technology development, her lab applies the resulting techniques to outstanding problems in neurobiology. She is now an associate professor in the Departments of Physics and Molecular & Cellular Biology at the University of California, Berkeley.