Biography
Hi, welcome! I’m Licheng Zou, currently a PhD student at Göttingen Campus Institute for Biological Networks/ Max-Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-organization, receiving supervision from Prof. Dr. Fred Wolf. Trained in applied mathematics and biomedical sciences, I’m now dedicated to theoretical neuroscience. Since 2024, the visual cortex has been another ‘home’ and I’m working to understand visual neuronal dynamics via multi-scale computational approaches.
Interests
- Mean-field Analysis
- Synaptic Plasticity
- Memory Attractor
- Evolutionary Optimization
- Turing Instability
- Large-scale Simulation
Education
PhD in Theoretical Neurophysics, 2028
Georg August University of Göttingen
MSc in Neurobiology, 2025
University of Amsterdam
BSc in Mathematics, 2023
Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Skills
Technical
Python
Matlab
Applied Mathematics
Hobbies
Movies
Fitness
Hiking
News
Publications & Talks & Conferences
- April 21 · Accepted by Neural Data Analysis Workshop @ FENS 2026, organized by Flatiron Institute. See you in July, Barcelona!
- May 07 · Accepted by Fred Kavli Summer School: Mathematical Methods in Computational Neuroscience. See you in July, Eresfjord!
- May 21 · 10 mins Young Scientist talk 'Highly distorted three-dimensional orientation fields in primary visual cortex ', with Daniel Hillier and Fred Wolf, Neurizon 2026, Göttingen, Germany.
- Dec 12 · Career Update! Official enrollment into the graduate program IMPRS for Physics of Biological and Complex Systems, with Fred Wolf, Tim Gollisch, Viola Priesemann serving on my Thesis Advisory Committee (TAC), and having Agostina Palmigiano as my external career advisor.
- Dec 9 · 5 mins Blitz talk and Poster 'Large-Scale Long-term Circuit Optimization Predicts Focal Areas High Speed Tuning Drift in V1', with Fred Wolf, The 5th Göttingen Neural Networking Day, Göttingen, Germany.
- Sep 27 · Invited talk at 集智俱乐部计算神经科学读书会第三季.
- Sep 17 - 19 · Participant at Annual retreat: SPP 2205 "Evolutionary Optimization of Neuronal Processing", Zeitz, Germany.
- Sep 1 · Career Update! I officially started as a doctoral researcher at Wolf Group, CIDBN. The preliminary thesis title is 'Dynamic Transformations in Cortical Circuits'.
- Aug 16 - 23 · Participant at CNeuro 2025, Institute of Neuroscience, Shanghai.
- July 30 · Publication Alert! Paper 'Representational drift as the consequence of ongoing memory storage', with Alex Roxin, has been published at Nature Scientific Reports.
- July 4 · Opening talk at AI-NS-Amath Journal Club, NYU Shanghai.
- June 3 · Career Update! I officially graduated from the master's program Cognitive Neurobiology & Clinical Neurophysiology. A summary of my master's can be found here.
- April 30 · Publication Alert! Paper 'Synaptic plasticity facilitates oscillations in a V1 cortical column model with multiple interneuron types', with Jorge Mejias, has been published at Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience.
- Sep 29 - Oct 2 · Poster 'Computational mechanisms of representational drift and odor perception in rodent olfactory systems', with Alex Roxin, Bernstein Conference 2024, Frankfurt, Germany.
- June 23 - July 14 · Participant at EBRAINS Brain Simulation Workshop 2024, Bilbao, Spain
- June 3 - July 7 · Participant at Computational and Cognitive Neuroscience (CCN) summer school 2025, Suzhou, China
- May 30 - 31 · Poster 'Computational mechanisms of representational drift and odor perception in rodent olfactory systems', with Alex Roxin, Barccsyn 2024, Barcelona, Spain.
- Oct 19 - 20 · Contributed talk at Donders Discussions 2023, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
- Sep 1 · Career Update! I officially started my master's studies at the University of Amsterdam.
- Jun 30 · Career Update! I officially graduated with my Bachelor's degree in Mathematics from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Zhiyuan Honors Undergraduate Program. I wanted to thank my dual supervisors, Douglas Zhou and Songting Li, for introducing me into the amazing computational neuroscience.
Experience
Doctoral Researcher
I’m honored to conduct doctoral studies at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-organizations, where my training program is the International Max Planck Research School “Physics of Biological and Complex Systems”. Under the supervision from Prof. Dr. Fred Wolf, my thesis focuses on ‘Dynamic Transformations in Cortical Circuits’.
Visiting Scientist (summer)
Together with Dr. Zhuocheng Xiao, we investigate the network mechanisms underlying the emergence of V1 functional receptive fields through large-scale simulations and multi-scale analysis.
Graduate Research Internship (hybrid)
An interdisciplinary collaboration across continents, aiming at investigating the neural mechanisms underlying macaque perceptual decision-making via pulvinar-cortex interactions. My role is to build up a bi-hemisphere thalamocortical circuit model to reproduce the collected neuronal spiking data under different scenarios – control, lesion, and micro-stimulation.
Graduate Research Internship
Funded by the Erasmus+ internship scholarship, I performed two research projects on representational drift under supervision of Dr. Alex Roxin. In the meantime, I actively participated in the academic events taking place within the Great Barcelona neuroscience community, including one conference and two workshops.
Undergraduate Research Internship
Funded by the generous Zhiyuan overseas internship scholarship, I performed the research project on distributed models underlying perceptual decision-making under supervision of Dr. Jorge Mejias. And my bachelor thesis was produced as part of the output of this internship.
Undergraduate Research Internship
Thanks for Dr. Douglas Zhou’s admission, I joined his lab co-directed by Dr. Songting Li and started my journey into computational neuroscience (CNS). During this internship, I got knowledge of foundation and different research topics in CNS, and presented interested literatures during weekly journal clubs. In the meantime, I attended two CNS winter schools hosted by the same institution and one online conference.
Projects
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Recent electrophysiology experiments report distributed cortical responses to a random-dot discrimination task, and we built a biologically plausible neocortical model incorporating with different datasets to capture this phenomenon.
With the emergence of large-scale recording data in mouse, we wondered whether a data-constrained model can replicate the functional receptive field properties across rodent V1 neuron types.
We tested the hypothesis treating RD as the inevitable consequence of synaptic turnover by fitting a network model to data from long-term chronic calcium imaging experiments in mouse hippocampus. Synaptic turnover in the model inputs, consistent with the ongoing encoding of new activity patterns, accounted for the observed statistics of RD.
Gallery
Recent Publications
Quickly discover relevant content by filtering publications.
(2025).
Synaptic plasticity facilitates oscillations in a V1 cortical column model with multiple interneuron types.
Front. Comp. Neuro.
Recent & Upcoming Talks
Contact
I believe no one would contact me with this link, in any case, I’d be glad to discuss about science through email with all over the world.
- lichengzou0509@gmail.com
- +31(0)616718944
- Wilhelmsplatz 1 (Aula), Göttingen, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen 37073
- Rroom 1.108, HDW 12
- DM Me