Neural Computations Underlying Affect

I'm a Postdoctoral Fellow and an NIH NeuroAI Early Career Scholar at Caltech and Stanford University, working with Scott Linderman, Pietro Perona and David J Anderson, where I combine experimental and theoretical tools to understand social behavior. I completed my PhD in Computation and Neural Systems at David Anderson's lab at Caltech, where I was also National Science Graduate Fellow of the Agency of Science, Technology and Research (a*star), Singapore. In my work, I hope to redefine the way we think of emotional behaviors and neuropsychiatric disorders by studying emotions like aggression through the lens of dynamical systems and machine learning. My work has been recognized through awards including the Peter and Patricia Gruber International Research Award from the Society for Neuroscience. I'm passionate about changing the narrative of mental health and, by re-conceptualizing mental disorders with the computational properties of neural circuits in mind, I hope we can begin embracing the diversity in how these disorders are expressed.

I also a co-founder and organizer of the annual Chen Data Science and AI Summer School for Neuroscience at Caltech, which is designed to empower the broader community to harness data-driven machine learning for scientific research. All our content, including lectures and code, is available at the link to the right.

I completed my undergraduate degree from the National University of Singapore, where I worked on integrating experimental and computational tools to study molecular pathways in Parkinson's Disease with Lim Kah Leong. I worked on dissecting microcircuits of the striatum with Gilad Silberberg at the Karolinska Institute as an Erasmus Scholar. I also spent a postbaccalaureate year as a National Science Scholar at a*star, Singapore, working with George Augustine on the co-release of neuromodulators from the basal forebrain.