Hi! I am Shaoyi Liu, a rising senior at the University of Pittsburgh. I am currently pursuing a major in neuroscience and a minor in bioengineering. It’s a great honor for me to be selected as one of the awardees of this year’s Brackenridge Fellowship!

Neuroscience is the discipline in which researchers apply different methodologies to investigate the nervous system at various levels (i.e., molecular, cognitive, computational, systems, etc.). While studies in neuroscience have recently become increasingly prosperous regardless of their perspectives, I am particularly interested in understanding how neurons interact with each other to initiate function, specifically motion, from a multivariate neural data analysis perspective. This summer, I am conducting my research under the supervision of Dr. Raeed Chowdhury in the Sensory Motor Integration Laboratory and Engineering (SMILE) lab at Pitt. My project aims to investigate the relationship between neuronal activity in the primary motor cortex and upper-limb muscular activity when a monkey learns to control the movement of a cursor on a screen using its thoughts. This project takes advantage of the Brain-Computer Interface (BCI), which converts brain signals to cursor movements to induce BCI-related learning. As BCI learning occurs, population neuron activity in the primary motor cortex (M1), the brain area suggested to initiate movement, changes as the M1 neural circuit reshapes itself. Moreover, coordinated activity among neurons in M1 initiates muscle contraction, forming the foundation of limb movement. However, traditional BCI studies do not extensively explore how learning-induced changes in M1 neural activity lead to changes in muscle contraction patterns. Investigating how muscle contraction patterns reshape as a result of reshaped M1 activity during motor learning, using data collected from microelectrode arrays and EMG, has the potential to help us better understand the process of learning a new motor skill at both neural and muscular levels. It also has the potential to instruct us on how to acquire new motor skills more proficiently.

In the future, I plan to pursue graduate studies in systems neuroscience and neural computation from a basic science perspective. Specifically, I would like to learn more about statistical tools to analyze large amounts of neural data and mathematical modeling methods to infer properties of functional neural ensembles. Science, I suggest, is a collection of work done by many scholars. Each individual from similar or different backgrounds shares thoughts from different angles and contributes jointly to the advancement of science. The Brackenridge Fellowship attracts a group of talented young researchers and fosters a community for them, encouraging interdisciplinary communication. It thus has the potential to benefit everyone within the community by enriching their methodologies and ways of viewing research questions in their own disciplines. As a member immersed in such a group, I believe it will expand my horizons about what’s going on in other disciplines and inform me of the methodologies/statistical methods others are using that may benefit my own project.