Introduction

Tsinghua University

She earned her B.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Jilin University and her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the Institute of Neuroscience, Chinese Academy of Sciences, followed by postdoctoral training at The Rockefeller University. In September 2020, she joined the School of Life Sciences at Tsinghua University, the IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research at Tsinghua University, and the Tsinghua–Peking Center for Life Sciences as a Principal Investigator.

Her research focuses on the neural mechanisms underlying emotion and social behavior, with particular emphasis on sex differences and state-dependent regulation. Her work has shown that the prefrontal cortex encodes female internal physiological states and integrates opposite-sex social cues to shape sociosexual behaviors across the estrous cycle; sex-specific modes of local microcircuit function in the prefrontal cortex also contribute to sex differences in social behavior (Cell, 2025). In parallel, her studies identified sex differences in local inhibitory microcircuits of the prefrontal cortex as an important neural basis for sex differences in anxiety susceptibility (Cell, 2016). Together, these findings highlight top-down cortical mechanisms that regulate adaptive changes in social behavior and emotional responses, and provide insight into the neural basis of their sex differences.