Bohan Zhao

Bohan Zhao is a neuroscientist whose research focuses on the cognitive functions of brain. He studied neural circuit mechanisms of memory encoding and received his Ph.D. from Tsinghua University in 2021. In his Ph.D. research, he developed multiple behavioural paradigms to measure the memory retention curve of fruit flies and identified two latent long-term memory (LTM) components, including context-dependent LTM (cLTM), and merged LTM (mLTM). The former encodes spatially consistent sensory stimuli as a unified memory representation, while the latter encodes temporally continuous sensory stimuli as a unified memory representation, jointly providing a novel insight into how spatially and temporally relevant information is organized in our memory network (Zhao et al., Nat Commun, 2019; Zhao et al., eLife, 2021; Zhao et al., Neurosci Bull, 2022).

At the end of 2021, Bohan joined Oxford as a Postdoctoral Research Scientist, working with Prof. Gero Miesenböck at the Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour (CNCB). Currently, he is holding a European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) Postdoctoral Fellowship, which will support his research from 2022 to 2024. In Gero's group, he will combine neural circuit tools with behavioural monitoring system to study the neural network underpinning sleep-wake regulation, using the fruit fly. His goal is to use this simple nervous system to understand the logic behind the state switching, like "sleep" vs "wake", in our brain.