Zhilei Zhao is a Klarman postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at Cornell University, working with Jesse Goldberg. He earned his B.S. in life sciences from Peking University and his Ph.D. in evolutionary neuroscience from Princeton University.

Zhao’s research leverages evolutionarily specialized animal behaviors to uncover general principles of neural circuit function. As a graduate student with Lindy McBride, he studied mosquitoes that specialize in biting humans and identified the olfactory code that drives host preference. In his postdoctoral work, Zhao established the budgerigar, a small parrot, as a novel animal model to study the neural basis of flexible social communication. Like humans, budgerigars live in complex fission-fusion groups, exhibit enormous vocal imitation capacities and modulate vocal production in different social contexts. Zhao discovered an anterior forebrain pathway that enables parrots to flexibly produce learned vocalizations. His current research aims to elucidate how the brain acquires and organizes large vocal repertoires, and how social information dynamically shapes vocal motor circuits during ongoing communication. By studying an animal model with rich vocal and social behaviors, Zhao seeks to reveal core mechanisms underlying social communication difficulties in autism.