Dr. Jai Yu

Biography

Jai Yu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago, having joined the faculty in July 2020. His research focuses on understanding the neurophysiological mechanisms that enable the creation of knowledge from individual experiences. He investigates how the coordinated activity of multiple brain regions over different time scales contributes to processes like memory formation. His work includes recording neural spiking activity from the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex to explore how these coordinated activities reflect distinct aspects of experience and memory transformation. Prior to his current role, he conducted postdoctoral research with Loren Frank at the University of California, San Francisco, using in-vivo electrophysiology to investigate the relationship between coordinated hippocampal-cortical activity and memory. He also worked as a data scientist for a startup in the San Francisco Bay Area, focusing on clinical device data for the development of wearable bioelectronic neuromodulation therapies. He completed his graduate research at the Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna, Austria, using genetic imaging methods to map neural circuits in the Drosophila brain.

Research Interests

Experience