PhD candidate in Neuroscience Harvard University

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I’m a neuroscience PhD candidate in Bernardo Sabatini’s Lab at the Harvard Medical School, where I work on understanding how local neural circuits in both biological and artificial brains alter their connections to enable learning and flexible behavior.

I joined the Harvard PiN program in 2021 and worked on rotation projects with Chenghua Gu and Stephen Liberles. Prior to PhD, I obtained a Bachelor's degree in Neuroscience with minor in Computer Science and Psychology from Duke University in 2021. As an undergrad, I worked in Fan Wang’s lab, where I studied executions and coordinations of rhythmic orofacial movements from neuroscience and evolutionary perspectives.

Table of contents

My work at Harvard

Synaptic sign switching mediates online dopamine update

Manuscript in preparation, 2025

• Discovered an unique form of synaptic plasticity in the brain, which allows synapses to switch between excitation and inhibition through learning.
• We showed that such sign-switching plasticity mediates online update of dopamine and is crucial for learning.
• This discovery challenges the long-held belief that synaptic connections between biological neurons are always either excitatory or inhibitory, carrying a fixed sign.

ATLAS: a rationally designed anterograde transsynaptic tracer

Nature Methods, 2025

Jacqueline F. Rivera, Haoyang Huang, Weiguang Weng, Heesung Sohn, Allison E. Girasole, Shun Li, Madeline A. Albanese, Melissa Qin, Can Tao, Molly E. Klug, Sadhna Rao, Ronald Paletzki, Bruce E. Herring, Scott E. Kanoski, Li I. Zhang, Charles R. Gerfen, Bernardo L. Sabatini & Don B. Arnold