I am a fifth-year PhD student in the Neurobiology program at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). My advisor is Prof. Markus Meister. My research focuses on cognitive flexibility, learning, and memory, with a particular interest in the essence of cortex and hippocampus in these functions. My current project, titled “Mice in the Manhattan Maze,” employs an original massively reconfigurable maze to study rapid learning and flexible routing in wildtype mice and acortical mice. I recently published a perspective about the human brain titled “the Unbearable Slowness of Being” on Neuron.

Beyond research, I am actively involved in teaching and student activities at Caltech. I developed my own 10-week tutorial Bi23 Sec1 Learning Across Species in Winter 2025. For two years, I served as the head teaching assistant for CNS187 Neural Computation, a graduate-level course requirement for students in Computation and Neural System. Additionally, I am the current president of the Neurotechers (23-), the official club for Caltech graduate students in neuroscience. You can learn more about me in a short Spotlight on Caltech’s frontpage, and a short assay about the best students in class.

In my free time, I enjoy exploring the mountains, hiking in the summer and skiing in the winter. In 2024, I summitted Mt Whitney in one day. I am also an avid bird watcher, writer, artist and wildlife photographer (check my art portfolio!).

Before joining Caltech, I did my undergraduate studies at Cornell University (B.S. in Biological Engineering) and Shanghai Jiao Tong University (B.Eng. in Food Science and Engineering). I then obtained a Master’s degree (M.Phil) in Education and Psychology from the University of Cambridge.

News and Announcements

2025/4/27 - I am attending and presenting a poster at the Conference of Grounding Cognition in Mechanistic Insight at HHMI Janelia. Contact me if you want to catch up.

2025/3/17 - My original course, Winter 2025 Bi23 Sec1 Learning Across Species: Foundations and Frontiers in the Ethology of Learning, just concluded! Caltech access to the Canvas archive here.

2024/12/17 - “The Unbearable Slowness of Being” was published today! Check out this page for more.

2024/11/14 - I gave a talk to the Harvard Medical School RL and the Brain Seminar about the Manhattan Maze project! Check out the talk content and slides here.

2024/08/20 - My first first-authored review, “the Unbearable Slowness of Being,” is now on arXiv!

2024/08/06 - I presented our latest progress on the Manhattan Maze, featuring acortical mice, in CCN 2024. Check out the most up-to-date project info through the link! I received a full travel grant from the Chen Institute for attending this conference.

2024/06/17 - My Advisor Prof. Markus Meister presented our work “Mouse navigation without hippocampus or neocortex”, of which I am co-first author, at iNAV 2024 in Merano, Italy.