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. I am fascinated by how biological systems solve challenging computational problems with remarkable efficiency. My long-term research goal is to understand how innate architectures of neural circuits support efficient learning and adaptive behavior for animals in their natural environments.

My graduate work studied these ideas in the context of early sensory systems, focusing on how statistics of the visual environment shape both behavior and neural representation (i.e., efficient coding). At Janelia, I develop theoretical frameworks for understanding inductive biases and learning, while collaborating closely with experimentalists to build tools and models for studying animal behavior in naturalistic environments.

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.