OUR TEAM

Research Focus

How does the brain learn? With a combination of experimental and computational approaches, we primarily focus on two questions: 1. What is the algorithm that updates connection weights between neurons during learning? 2. How does a neural network transfer its previously learned knowledge to new tasks? We will investigate these questions in mice with multi-disciplinary technologies, including electrophysiology, imaging, optogenetics, computational neuroscience, and machine learning. We believe in a positive feedback loop between experimental and computational studies, which will eventually facilitate both the understanding of the brain and the development of novel artificial intelligent systems.

Profile

Xinyu ZHAO, Assistant professor and doctoral supervisor, joined the School of Life Sciences at Tsinghua University, Tsinghua-IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Science, and Tsinghua-Peking University Joint Center for Life Sciences in 2022. The laboratory will combine electrophysiology, optical imaging, virtual reality behaviour, optogenetics and other technical means to study the neural mechanism of the learning process in mice. The focus will be to explore: 1. How cell-level calculations (e.g., synaptic plasticity, dendritic integration) play a role in neural circuit computation; 2. Offline learning, the neural activity of animals at rest or sleeping, play a role in education. Based on the experiment, we will also use computational neuroscience and artificial intelligence methods to establish the corresponding neural network learning model. Before joining Tsinghua University, Dr. Xinyu Zhao studied and worked at Northwestern University and the Howard Hughes Institute for Medical Research (HHMI). He has long studied the neural mechanisms of vision and memory.