Bio Sketch

I grew up in Beijing, China. I studied at Yuanpei college in Peking University, where I majored in theoretical physics and took additional courses in philosophy, math and psychology to lay my foundation of knowledge. Mentored by the computational neuroscientist Louis Tao, I initiated my journey of neuroscience. There I learned the taste of a theorist, but I also liked to use data to drive theory and hypothesis generation. So in 2017, I collaborated with the primate visual neuroscientist Shiming Tang to analyze and model 2-photon imaging data from macaque V1; and I interned with Alex Reyes in NYU to develop algorithms to analyze traces of whole-cell electrophysiology in mice auditory cortex. 

After graduation in 2018, I came to the neuroscience program in Washington University in St. Louis. There I started to think about how to combine computational thinking with experimental methods and data. Driven by this, I did research rotations at three different levels of the brain but all require interesting computational methods to deal with big data: from EM connectomics of mice LGN, to light-sheet imaging of fish, to visual hierarchy of monkeys. Finally, I joined the Carlos Ponce lab in 2019.

In the Ponce lab, fascinated by the closed-loop experimental approach of studying vision, I worked on several developments of the Evolution system: develop / adapt optimization algorithms, analyze and extend to other image generators, etc. Moreover, trained in physics, I was deeply interested in modern geometry / topology and how this view could impact the analysis of dynamics, representation and networks. So I applied differential geometric notion and techniques to analyze the neural representations in the brain and in the neural networks. 

In Sep. 2021, our lab moved to Harvard Medical School Neurobiology Department. So I'm here now!

Out of lab, I'm also interested in reading, learning traditional chinese dance, and doing fun coding projects!