I’m a neuroscience PhD student at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behavior.
In the Erlich Lab, I try to understand how the brain learns about the value in different options and makes value-based decisions in a closed-loop for some goal (e.g. maximising overall utility), and the role dopamine plays (or not) in this process, by contrasting behaviour tasks containing different forms of information and uncertainty. This is a vast topic, and things can easily get messy while I dig into it, before I finally find some answer at the bottom of my backpack (<–refer to the left).
To study this, we borrow from the human and non-human primates literature, use rodent behavior model to facilitate recording and manipulating brain activity, and use various modified reinforcement learning model to try capture the algorithms and mechanisms of those learning and decision-making processes.
Before coming to the PhD program in systems neuroscience, I explored subjects like philosophy (of mind, of science), economics, and cognitive science in my college time, with an undirected interest in overall human mind and behavior, and collected bits and pieces of relevant skills along the way. They now came together to sculpture the current me and my project.
Shoot me an email at cong%dot%sun%dot%swc%at%gmail.com if you are interested in the things glossed over above (or anything)! Have a good day.