About Me

Yuanning Li, Ph.D. [CV]

I am currently an Assistant Professor in the School of Biomedical Engineering at ShanghaiTech University, where I direct the Computational Cognitive and Translational Neuroscience Lab. I am also a visiting investigator at the Neurosurgical Institute of Fudan University, Huashan Hospital. My lab mainly uses human electrophysiology and computational methods to study the neural basis of high-level cognitive processes, including speech, language and vision.

Before joining ShanghaiTech, I was a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Neurological Surgery at the University of California, San Francisco, where I worked with Edward Chang. Prior to UCSF, I completed my PhD in the joint Program in Neural Computation & Machine Learning at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, where I was co-advised by Avniel Ghuman (with Pitt Neurological Surgery) and Max G’Sell (with CMU Statistics). Before my PhD, I received Master’s degree in Electrical & Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon and Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the School of Advanced Engineering at Beihang University.

My research interests primarily lie in the intersection between computational and cognitive neuroscience. The two main goals of my research are:

• to understand how different aspects of high-level sensory and semantic information are represented and processed in neural populations, underlying cognitive processes such as language and vision;
• to build computational models for neural encoding and decoding of these cognitive processes in the brain.

To achieve these goals, I develop and apply statistical machine learning methods to analyze large-scale neural data recorded using ECoG, fMRI and M/EEG.