Prof. YANG Sungchil

Sungchil Yang achieved Ph.D in the department of molecular and integrative physiology, the University of Illinois at Urbana & Champaign, studying the biophysical role of individual auditory neurons (from the cochlear nucleus to the auditory cortex) in auditory information processing under the supervision of Dr. Albert S. Feng. Then, he joined Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute of the University of California at Berkeley as a postdoctoral fellow, studying mechanisms of auditory phantom pain, with Dr. Shaowen Bao. His research regarding the sensory system continued in the Center for Integrative Neuroscience of the University of California at San Francisco as a research associate, studying the role of axon initial segment of auditory neurons in information processing and a cellular basis of perceptual learning with Dr. Kevin J. Bender and Christoph E. Schreiner, respectively. Then, he joined the department of neuroscience at the City University of Hong Kong.

• Brain Mapping
• Synaptic Plasticity
• Perceptual Learning
• Phantom Pain
• Psychiatry Disorders

A fundamental question in neuroscience is on how a neuron processes innate and environmental cues in order to produce behaviorally relevant outputs. The several hypotheses how the inputs are stored, adapted, and learned have been proposed, yet their working models remain to be explored. For this, we study both the sensory system (for a mechanistic understanding of sensory learning) and hippocampus (for cellular mechanisms of memory) with modern techniques such as in vivo multichannel recording, two-photon imaging, in vivo whole-cell recording, and various behavior tasks. This research will be eventually applied to alleviate information processing disorders embedded in brain diseases.