PrintLab Members
PI
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Biyu Jade He Biyu is currently Associate Professor of Neurology, Neuroscience and Physiology, and Radiology at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. She is also an investigator in the Neuroscience Institute. Biyu received her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Washington University in St. Louis. Prior to joining NYU, she led her own independent research group in the intramural research program of the NIH/NINDS, with an intramural equivalent of the NIH Director’s Early Independence Award. Her laboratory uses a combination of multimodal human brain imaging, brain stimulation, and computational approaches to investigate the neural mechanisms of perceptual processing in the human brain. She has also made original contributions to understanding the functional roles of spontaneous brain activity and aperiodic brain activity. Among other awards, she has received a Society for Neuroscience Trubatch Career Development Award (2018), an NSF CAREER Award (2018–2023), a Leon Levy Neuroscience Fellowship (2016–2017), a Klingenstein-Simons Fellowship Award (2016–2019), an Irma T. Hirschl Career Scientist Award (2020–2025), and the 2023 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science. She has been a Keynote Speaker at the annual meetings of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC, 2016), the Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM, 2020), and Gordon Research Conference on “Consciousness, Anesthesia and Evolutionary Biology” (2023). Since 2018, she has been a member at large on the Board of ASSC. Email: Biyu.He@nyulangone.org |
Lab Members
Research Scientists
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Martijn Wokke Martijn obtained his MSc in Psychology from The University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in 2006. He continued to pursue a life of science in Amsterdam by joining the lab of Dr. Victor Lamme. During his Ph.D. project, Martijn focused on the way our brains produce visual perception using brain stimulation and EEG recordings. In 2014, the scientific waters took him into the realm of internally oriented processes, including metacognition, prediction, and creative thinking. He investigated these topics in Brussels with Dr. Axel Cleeremans and in the labs of Dr. Tony Ro in New York and Dr. Tristan Bekinschtein in Cambridge (Marie Curie Global Fellowship 2018-2021). Currently, Martijn is investigating how (conscious/unconscious) internally generated information emerges in the brain. To this end, he uses psychophysics, neuroimaging methods (fMRI, MEG/EEG), and non-invasive brain stimulation (TMS). Email: martijnwokke@gmail.com |
Post-doctoral Fellows
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Yuan-hao Wu Yuan-hao attained his B.Sc. in Psychology at University Graz and M.Sc.in Cognitive Neuroscience at Freie Universität Berlin. He completed his Ph.D. training in Felix Blankenburg’s group at Freie Universität Berlin in 2019, studying working memory and decision-making in the somatosensory domain. Yuan-hao joined Dr. He’s lab in March 2020. His current research focuses on two main topics: 1) interplay between prior information and sensory inputs that gives rise to the visual perception; 2) neural mechanisms underlying visual perception, imagination, and hallucination. To tackle these questions, he uses a combination of methods, including neuroimaging (fMRI, M/EEG), psychophysics, and computational modeling. Email: yuanhao.wu@nyulangone.org |
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Lua Koenig Lua obtained her B.A. in Neuroscience from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland in 2014. She then joined Dr Tony Ro’s lab at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York to pursue her PhD. There she focused on the neural mechanisms of conscious perception, and in particular touch perception. She investigated the neural underpinnings of unconscious touch, and several tactile illusions including sound-touch synesthesia. She is interested in how conscious perception arises through the interaction of sensory information with internal brain states, and how this interaction explains individual differences in perception. To this end, she uses psychophysics, neuroimaging methods (fMRI and EEG) and non-invasive brain stimulation (TMS). Email: Lua.Koenig@nyulangone.org |
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Emily Thomas Emily completed her B.Sc. in Psychology at the University of Lincoln, UK in 2015. She then obtained her M.Sc. in Brain and Cognition at Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands, where she conducted a research project in spatial cognition, examining assumptions of embodied cognition. Following this, she joined Prof Clare Press' lab at Birkbeck, University of London to undertake her PhD, examining the influences of prediction on visual and tactile perception and sensory processing in action contexts. Emily joined Dr. Biyu He's lab in June 2021 to work on projects examining the neural correlates of conscious perception across sensory modalities, and how prior knowledge influences perception and conscious awareness. To conduct this research she uses a combination of psychophysics and neuroimaging methods. Email: Emily.Thomas2@nyulangone.org |
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Giulia Gennari Giulia obtained her B.Sc. in Cognitive Psychology and her M.Sc. in Neuroscience from the University of Padua, Italy. In 2016 she spent a period as a research assistant in Dr. Floris de Lange’s lab (Donders Institute, Netherlands) where she focused on predictive processes within the human visual cortex. Following this experience, she joined the Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit (UNICOG) of Neurospin, France. During her PhD, she worked in the team of Dr. Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz and employed high-density EEG to reveal the representational primitives used by the human infant brain to encode speech, quantity and musical pitch. She arrived in Dr. Biyu He's lab in February 2022. Her current research pertains to the temporal structure underlying perceptual awareness. Adopting a temporal perspective, she aims to uncover the neural mechanisms determining conscious access and perceptual updates. |
Graduate Students
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Jonathan D. Shor Jonathan received his B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Delaware, and subsequently spent over a decade in the private sector. After rising to the position of COO of a mid-sized consumer goods company, he decided the trick had been won and it was time to pursue his passion: computational neuroscience. He earned his M.S. in Computer Science from Columbia University in 2018, including a project in Rafael Yuste’s lab where he developed a computational method to detect temporal ensembles in spike train data. Jonathan is currently pursuing his PhD at NYU, and has recently joined the lab of Dr. Biyu He and plans to investigate how the underlying neural mechanisms differ between conscious and unconscious perception. Email: jds814@nyu.edu |
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Brandon Chen Brandon received his B.A. in psychology from Bard College. He then spent two years at the NIH as a post-bac IRTA fellow in the lab of Afonso Silva investigating neurovascular coupling using two-photon imaging. After, he spent two years in the lab of Alipasha Vaziri developing methods to enable large-scale neuronal recordings. Currently, he is interested in understanding how internal representations influence perception. Email: bc1693@nyu.edu
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Ayaka Hachisuka Ayaka received her B.S. in neuroscience from UCLA, where she spent a few years in the lab of Dr. Mayank Mehta's lab studying spatial navigation. She then worked in the lab of Dr. Sotiris Masmanidis studying reward-guided learning and movement. Currently, she is pursuing her PhD at NYU in the lab of Dr. Biyu He. She is interested in neural mechanisms of conscious visual perception. Email: ayaka.hachisuka@nyulangone.org
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Daniel Haşegan Daniel received his B.S. in Computer Science from Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany. He then spent eight years in the tech industry, advancing Deep Learning models for applications in social networks and medical diagnosis. Transitioning to biological networks, he worked with Dr. Samuel Neymotin, where he developed biologically plausible learning mechanisms for Spiking Neuronal Networks. Further, he worked with Dr. Manish Saggar at Stanford to adapt the Mapper algorithm to extract the dynamics of neuroimaging datasets (focusing on fMRI data). Currently, he is pursuing his PhD at NYU in the lab of Dr. Biyu He. Daniel is investigating the dynamics and interactions of brain oscillations (e.g., traveling waves) during conscious and unconscious perception. |
Alumni
Post-doctoral Fellows
2020–2022 Shira Baror (Ph.D. in psychology, Bar-Ilan University, Tel Aviv, Israel)
Next Position: Post-doctoral fellow, Hebrew University, Israel
2016–2021 Ella Podvalny (Ph.D. in neuroscience, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel)
Next Position: Research fellow, Rutgers University
2016–2021 Richard Hardstone (Ph.D. in neuroscience, VU University Amsterdam, Netherlands)
Next Position: Research fellow, Massachusetts General Hospital
2017–2020 Thomas Baumgarten (Ph.D. in psychology, University of Dusseldorf, Germany)
Honor: Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellowship, European Commission
Next/Current Position: Program Officer, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), Germany
2013–2017 Brian Maniscalco (Ph.D. in psychology, Columbia University)
Next Position: Associate project scientist, University of California, Irvine
PhD Students
2015–2017 Carlos González-García, visiting student from University of Granada, Spain
Honor: Fulbright scholarship, U.S. Department of State
Current Position: Ramón y Cajal fellow, University of Granada, Spain
Lab manager
2017–2019 Max Levinson (B.S. in Biological Sciences, Cornell University)
Next Position: Graduate student, McGill University Ph.D. Program in Neuroscience
NIH Post-baccalaureate Intramural Research Training Award (IRTA) Fellows
2015–2017 Matthew W. Flounders (B.S. in neuroscience, University of Pittsburgh)
Next Position: Medical student, Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine
2014–2015 Raymond Chang (B.S. in psychology-neuroscience, Yale University)
Next Position: Medical student, Cornell University
2014–2015 Amy Lin (B.A. in neuroscience, Colorado College)
Next Position: Graduate student, UCLA Ph.D. Program in Neuroscience
2012–2014 Zacchary Hill Douglas (B.A. in biology-neuroscience, Washington University in St. Louis)
Next Position: Medical student, University of Washington
2011–2013 Megan Wang (B.S. in biology, University of California at Irvine)
Next Position: Graduate student, Stanford University Ph.D. Program in Neurosciences
2010–2011 Daniel Arteaga (B.A. in biochemistry, Washington University in St. Louis)
Next Position: Medical student, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine
Notable Undergraduates
2019–2022 Dillan Spector (NYU neuroscience major)
Honor: NYU Dean’s Undergraduate Research Fund (DURF) Grant
Next Position: medical student at University of Miami
2016–2018 Michael Zhu (NYU neuroscience major)
Honors: NYU Training Program for Computational Neuroscience Award; NYU DURF Grant;
Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative Undergraduate Research Award
Next Position: Masters student in Data Science at UC Berkeley
2017–2018 Leana King (NYU Neuroscience / Psychology)
Honor: NYU Dean’s Undergraduate Research Fund (DURF) Grant
Next Position: Graduate student, PhD Program in Neuroscience at UC Berkeley