Postdoctoral Fellow

Tingting Zhou

Tingting is currently a joint postdoc of Guoping Feng lab and Michael Halassa lab. She is interested in understanding how the schizophrenic brain was disabled in controlling thoughts and actions based on an misinterpreted internal model of the world. She did her phD with Hailan Hu in the Institute of Neuroscience of CAS in Shanghai and medical school of Zhejiang University. During her phD she mainly focused dissecting neural circuits of social dominance behaviors where she found that thalao-prefrontal cortex circuit mediated the “winner effect”. During her postdoc, she is mainly focusing on understanding the pathology of schizophrenia. The genetic mice model carrying the identical genetic alterations in schizophrenia patients and parameterized behavioral tasks are the two of the most powerful tools that enabled Tingting’s research from molecular level to system level. Besides, Tingting is also interested in developing behavioral therapeutic methods to improve cognitive functions of schizophrenic patients. The ultimate goal is to come up with a therapeutic approach that targets those gene alterations in specific brain circuits to improve the cognitive functions of schizophrenic patients. In her spare time, Tingting likes all kinds of physical activities like weight lifting, pingpong, pilates, hiking, and boxing. She also enjoys relative quiet activities like drawing and meditation.