Li Zhaoping

Professor of computational neuroscience in the Department of Computer Science in University College London

Zhaoping obtained her B.S. in Physics in 1984 from FudanUniversity, Shanghai, and Ph.D. in Physics in 1989 from California Institute ofTechnology. She was a postdoctoral researcher in Fermi National Laboratory,Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and Rockefeller University. She hasbeen a faculty member in Computer Science in Hong Kong University of Scienceand Technology, and was a visiting scientist at various academic institutions.In 1998, she helped to found the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit inUniversity College London. Currently, she is a Professor of computationalneuroscience in the Department of Computer Science in University CollegeLondon. Her research experience throughout the years’ ranges from areas in highenergy physics to neurophysiology and marine biology, with most experience inunderstanding the brain functions in vision, olfaction, andin nonlinear neural dynamics. In late90s and early 2000s, she proposed a theory (which is being extensivelytested) that the primary visual cortex in the primate brain creates asaliency map to automatically attract visual attention to salientvisual locations. She is the author of UnderstandingVision: theory, models, and data, Oxford University Press, 2014.