Principal Investigator at Department of Biomedical Engineering, School of Medicine, and McGovern Institute for Brain Research.

He received PhD degree in computational neuroscience from Brandeis University in 2002, and completed postdoctoral research at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2010, he joined the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Tsinghua University. His main research interest is in interdisciplinary research in computational neuroscience, artificial intelligence. He also has considerable experience in research on neural circuits, bioinformatics, and genomics. His representative work includes the theoretical study on the spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP) published in Nature Neuroscience and Neuron, and the study on the motif analysis of local brain circuits published in PLos Biology. In recent years, his lab has also conducted a series of work on neural circuits underlying emotion and motivation, which are published in Cell Reports, Journal of Neuroscience and others. In the field of artificial intelligence, he is interested in applying deep learning to the analysis of brain imaging data and healthcare and education. In the 2017 Kaggle Datascience Bowl International Competition, students from the laboratory, in collaboration with the laboratory of Xiaolin Hu from the CS department, stood out from thousands of teams and won the first place, developing a lung cancer prediction algorithm based on CT images. Recent new interests include: brain-scale cognitive models, modeling and analysis of complex temporal and spatial data such as EEG with applications in social interaction and positive psychology research, and neuro-aesthetics.