My career has consistently reflected overlapping interests in psychology, fundamental biology and applied science. During the past 10 years, I focused heavily on studying sensory systems, especially on somatosensation and vision. In my PhD, I discovered that the neural transformation of spatial information along the visual pathway accounts for the simultaneous generation of cortical columnar organization and new feature detectability in a primate-like animal model, tree shrews. For my postdoctoral research, I tested if the coding principles and dendritic computation I described in the visual system can be generalized to the somatosensory system and assess if it compares across species. Overall, my work partially answered the great mystery about how neural circuits systematically represent multidimensional features, and how the emergence of functional diversity at the single-cell level contributes to this representation. As a fellow with the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) Postdoctoral Fellowship program, I had the unique opportunity to conduct independent and high-risk/high-reward research projects that matched my interests and developmental needs. Through the course of my scientific career, I engaged in many collaborative research projects with local faculty and beyond, yielding multiple first-authored publications in Nature and Neuron. Outside of the lab, I am also an active podcaster on scientific outreach to general public and mid-career scientists across the globe. Our channel “Sky in the wall” (https://linktr.ee/Skyinthewall) has over 20k followers and is one of the most followed podcast programs on scientific topics in the Chinese-speaking community worldwide. 

Research & Projects

Understand the fundamental mechanisms underlying somatosensation

We use approaches in advanced optical imaging/optogenetics, molecular genetics, functional anatomy, electrophysiology, and closed-loop/freely-moving mouse behavior to comprehensively understand the fundamental mechanisms underlying somatosensation.

We are interested to understand the neural circuits underlying information coding, from the earliest sensory transduction at the peripheral organ all the way to the sophisticated cortical computation.

Our laboratory will investigate the neural underpinnings of touch, pain and related affective aspects in the brainstem, and will reverse engineer it to develop sensory neuroprostheses and potentially, an affective brain–machine interface for pain management and mood regulation.