Hi! I'm Ruobing.
Name: Ruobing Xia (夏 若冰)
Birth: 1989
Hometown: Tianjin, China
Email: icexrb <at> gmail.com
Graduate from: Nanjing University, Dept. of Physics
And now: Research Assistant in Mingsha Zhang's Lab, Institute of Neuroscience, Chinese Acad. of Sci., Shanghai
Hobbies: science, science fiction, drawing cartoon, photographing, ice-skating, badminton...
(This picture was taken when I graduated from NJU.)
My name is actually an interesting paradox. My first name, Ruobing, means "to be like ice" or icy. My last name, Xia, means summer. So, you can also call me "Icy Summer". Some people said this name is just an image of my characters. =)
How I stepped into the field of neuroscience
I was born in a doctors' family. Since very young, I have been filled with curiosity to know how the systems in human body can do such a complex and beautiful work. It was a book introducing Gestalt Vision and visual cortex that opened my eyes to neuroscience, which convinced me that the brain must be the most wonderful creation of nature. In order to establish a good foundation of sciences, I chose to study physics in Nanjing University, whose physics department ranked number one in 2007 Chinese university rankings. During this period, my concerns with life science remained high, especially the neuroscience. I was aware that so many principles in physics and mathematics were decided by the way people see, feel and imagine the world. With the interest in brain, I took as many bio-related courses as I could, and finally got a bachelor degree in physics with professional emphasis on biophysics. In the junior year, I attended a series lecture of neuroscience given by Professor Jianjun Wang, in which I learnt how fascinating the neural system is and got to know that a physics student also had the opportunity to become a good neuroscientist. Since then, I have been wishing to build my career in exploring the brain.
My first study in neuroscience
In the summer of 2010, I visited Dr. Mingsha Zhang’s lab in Institute of Neuroscience, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and stayed here for internship. Zhang’s lab studies on the spatial cognition and sensorimotor transformation in monkey and human. I finished my undergraduate thesis in this lab, which is a modeling study on perisaccadic mislocalization. After reading a lot of papers about spatial cognition, I began to be interested in the perisaccadic perception. To better understand these interesting phenomena, I repeated the classical experiments using variant parameters and observed the spatial and temporal features of compression and shift. Then inspired by Shaobo Guan’s work, I modified his recurrent basis function network and simulated the perisaccadic spatial representation. This simulation successfully leads to either a compression or a shift pattern due to simple switch. The results were consistent with both behavioral and electrophysiological data. Through this work, I came across some difficulties in designing the network and in adjusting the experimental conditions and network parameters. Thanks to my physics training, I could solve these problems using mathematical analysis, and carried out the study independently. Also, I found my strong interest in the research of vision-related higher functions.
My research experience in the Institute of Neuroscience
After graduation this year, I became a research assistant in this lab. I trained monkeys for the lab and took part in several studies. One of them is about the attention modulation on saccade latency. We combined the gap and cueing paradigms and concluded that the covert attention may have a routing effect on two modes of saccade. Another study reported a long-term saccadic adaptation induced in dark environment that was little recovered by daily experience. The results might suggest separate visuomotor processes between with and without visual references. I participated in doing experiments, analyzing data, interpreting results and writing manuscript in these studies, both of which were submitted to Journal of Neurophysiology (the first one is under second revision). Besides, I started a psychophysical study on perisaccadic spatial perception, continuous with my undergraduate project. With some novel observations, I tried to explain these behavioral phenomena by computational simulations. In addition, I took several training courses, such as a course on the neurobiology of memory given by Prof. Susan Sara, and the computational neuroscience winter school held by Shanghai Jiao Tong University. The past year in lab brought me much valuable experience, important research skills including programming, behavioral tasks designing, animal training, modeling, and a general picture of systems neuroscience, which shaped my interests in future research.
My research interest and my academic goal for the graduate study
I am strongly interested in the mechanisms underlying visual information processing and higher order functions, such as attention and memory, since our mind and concepts rely on the way we see, memorize and interact with the world to a great extent. These topics are also filled with challenges and mysteries, which make them rather impressive to me. To go further in these fields, I plan to seek an opportunity for pursuing my doctoral study in a world-class neuroscience program. In my previous researches, the psychophysical experiments provided me with a window to the neural system in behavior level, and led me to raising many questions on the underlying mechanisms. To access to the essence, I would like to further investigate the neural activities (e.g., via neurophysiological recording or functional imaging) and to reduce these complex dynamic processes to abstract models. Therefore, my plans for the graduate study are: 1) to further my learning and understanding in neuroscience, and 2) to research on system/cognitive neuroscience with a combination of physiological experiments and network modeling. Now I am more close to my dream since my university years, or even since childhood – to understand the brain. I believe I can do it!
More detail about my research experience, please refer to the Research>>>.
