Personal Website

About Me

Hi there! Welcome to my website!

My name is Ling-Qi Zhang. I am currently a Theory Fellow at Janelia Research Campus. My research aims to build a conceptual and quantitative understanding of how built-in structures in behavior and neural circuits allow biological systems to learn and act efficiently in their natural environments.

My graduate work studied these ideas through the lens of efficient coding, asking how the structure of the environment shapes perception and neural representation. My current work generalizes the same logic to natural behavior, where I study how the inductive biases of the brain shape learning and adaptive behavior in different task contexts. At Janelia, I also collaborate closely with experimentalists to build tools and models for studying complex animal behavior in naturalistic experiments.

I received my Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, working with David Brainard and Alan Stocker. I also hold an M.A. in Statistics from Penn. Before that, I got my B.E. in Computer Science from Southern University of Science and Technology, which was newly established in 2011 in Shenzhen, China (Here is a short story about our university).

See Research for some of my past projects, and Publications for the list of my publications.