Jingwen Li is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychology at University of California, San Diego. She received her doctorate in physics with a neuroscience concentration at the University of Arkansas, where she worked with Woodrow Shew. Her doctoral study examined the population dynamics shaped by excitation/inhibition (E/I) balance during natural behavior and their alterations in Rett syndrome (RTT). Using network modeling and large-scale recordings in freely moving rats, she revealed how proper E/I tuning enables flexible cortical states and identified neural mechanisms linking E/I imbalance to motor dysfunction in RTT.

Li then joined the laboratory of Cory Miller at the University of California, San Diego for postdoctoral training, focusing on the neural mechanisms of visual and social behavior in naturalistic settings. She developed a model-based approach to characterize the representation of natural vocal communication in marmoset frontal cortex, revealing a distributed functional organization across sensory, motor and cognitive domains. Furthermore, she was integral in developing a head-mounted eye-tracking system for freely moving marmosets, enabling studies of the primate visual systems during natural behavior. Extending this line of research, Li aims to investigate disruptions in visual and social processing in autism.