Yifan

Since 2021, I have been conducting visual attention neural circuit research in Dr. Siyu Zhang's lab at the School of Basic Medical Sciences, SJTU.

I am proficient in using cutting-edge techniques including viral tracing, electrophysiology, calcium imaging, fiber photometry, and optogenetics to reveal neural network functions.

Major achievements include:

• A study on transcallosal cross-inhibitory circuits in the ACA brain region, published in Nature Comm. as a co-author
• An anatomical and computational neuroscience study on basal forebrain cholinergic system function, soon to be published in Science Adv. (manuscript in first revision) as a key co-author—in this study, I independently developed a generalized linear model (GLM) to analyze the dynamic effects of behavioral events on ACh, achieving a breakthrough from zero to one in behavioral computational neuroscience at SJTU School of Medicine.

From 2022 to 2024, I led a bioinformatics study on hepatoblastoma under the guidance of Dr. Jian He, director of the Single-Cell Platform at the Medical School.

We completed:

• Analysis of exome expression profiles from Chinese hepatoblastoma patients, discovering significant inter-individual genetic heterogeneity
• Development of a novel single-cell transcriptome sample preparation technique that successfully obtained high-quality data, revealing different tumor evolution strategies

This research won awards at multiple academic conferences and competitions. The newly invented sample preparation technique was published in the Cell journal STAR Protocols as co-first author and received high praise from Dr. Mandovi Chatterjee, director of the Single Cell Core at Harvard Medical School.

During this internship, I assisted the Project Management Department to manage and evaluate several drug pipelines, ranging from very early stages of preclinical development to later clinical development and commercialization strategies.