Jingfeng Zhou, Ph.D.

Research Interests

My research interest has coalesced around a desire to understand the neural circuit mechanisms of animal behavior and cognition. In my graduate studies, I mainly focused on the neural representations of predicted and received appetitive stimuli in the dorsal raphe nucleus and orbitofrontal cortex. Currently, I’m using in vivo electrophysiology as a primary tool, combined with complex behavioral tasks, optogenetics, and computational tools, to map neural dynamics embedded in the neural population activities – primarily in the orbitofrontal cortex and hippocampus – to the hidden cognitive variables that underlie learning, memory, and decision-making. I also have a great interest in how these neural representations and their behavioral functions would be altered in neuropsychiatric disease conditions such as addiction.

Publications