Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind Selects 2023-2024 Postdoctoral Scholars

Second-year program supports innovative neuroscience research

July 6, 2023

By Mario Aguilera

KIBM 2023-2024 Postdoctoral Scholars

The Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind (KIBM) at the University of California San Diego has named its second cohort of postdoctoral scholars.

The program was established last year to provide financial support and networking opportunities for outstanding postdoctoral scholars at UC San Diego and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. KIBM scholars receive $50,000 for a 12-month period, which is renewable for a second year contingent on progress and the faculty mentor's continued sponsorship. Scholars participate in monthly meetings and provide a presentation about their research at the KIBM annual retreat.

The 2023-24 KIBM Postdoctoral Scholars are:

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  Jingwen Li

  Jingwen Li is a postdoctoral fellow in the Cortical System & Behavior Laboratory (principal investigator: Cory Miller) at the Department of Psychology, UC San Diego. She received her PhD in physics with a neuroscience concentration at the University of Arkansas in 2021. Her research interest lies in the neural basis and population mechanism underlying natural behavior and employs both experimental and computational approaches. In her postdoctoral training, she mainly focuses on the nueral basis of active vision in marmosets, and aims to examine the neurophysiology of active visual processing. She also works on a project focused on developing a generalized linear model (GLM)-based analysis to study the population activity of natural communication in the marmoset frontal cortex.

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  Mengni Wang

  Mengni Wang is a postdoctoral scholar in the laboratory of Jill Leutgeb at the UC San Diego School of Biological Sciences. She received her PhD in 2020 from UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas where she studied learning and memory in the hippocampus and discovered a novel mechanism underlying the expression of retrospective memory. During her postdoctoral research, she investigates the information processing and neural computations that support the encoding of working memory in the CA3-dentate gyrus network of the hippocampus.

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  Junxiang Zhou

  Junxiang Zhou is a postdoctoral scholar in the laboratory of Professor Yishi Jin at the UC San Diego School of Biological Sciences. He received his undergraduate degree in life sciences from the University of Science and Technology of China, and his PhD at the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. While earning his PhD he studied the relationship between mitochondrial dynamics and metabolism. As a postdoctoral scholar he is interested in how neurons adapt to diverse external and internal stresses. He currently employs the transparent nematode Caenorhabditis elegans as a model system to investigate the reorganization of cytoskeletal architecture within neurons under different stress conditions, aiming to shed light on the mechanisms behind neuronal resilience and adaptation.